17 October 2001
Last year: Here's a hint for you, in case you ever decide you want to open up a restaurant:
Last night around 7, I was dragging. I mean, dragging. Which isn't too surprising, since I'd only gotten about five hours of sleep the night before, and I've cut out caffeine for a while. I was seriously considering going to bed at 8:30 or 9, I was so tired.
But I've been having trouble with my computer's DVD-ROM drive again - I put a disc in and it spins up... then down... then up... then down... I can't actually do anything or click on anything while it's doing this, and the disc never does mount. This happens irregularly, but frequently. Yesterday it was taking me four and five tries to mount a disc. Quite annoying.
So I gave up and called Apple's tech support. The tech support guy had me re-install my system software. (That is, for my non-Mac readers, re-install the operating system.) Well, that seemed to fix the problem - though I'm not quite holding my breath - but messed up my preferences and settings and uninstalled most of my drivers.
But Macs are merciful. All your preferences are stored in one folder, and when you re-install the system software, it backs up the old system stuff. All I had to do was copy my old preferences into the new folder, and they were back the way I wanted them.
Luckily, being the technical geek-wonk that I am, I'd kept all my downloaded installers in a subdirectory, and the other installers are on CDs. But of course almost all the installers force you to reboot afterwards...
I spent a good forty-five minutes just re-installing things. Drivers for the printer, the scanner, the SCSI converter, the mouse (I don't ever actually use the plug-in mouse, but it lets me adjust the mouse speed on a much finer scale than the operating system does), the Palm synchronizer, the CD burner... I can't remember if I re-installed the drivers for the floppy drive.
And while I was installing I think I might have located the original problem. But maybe not. We'll see, I guess.
I got a project at work yesterday that suits me so well I wanted to laugh. One of our managers has a program that demonstrates some hardware, but the demo program runs in a DOS window and is really ugly. So they need me to make a GUI out of it.
If I had more than two days, I could come up with a really impressive demo, but as it is, I got the basic functionality of the thing up and running yesterday. Today I'm going to play with some more possibilities, but as the demo itself is next week, I can't get too fancy.
But it was the kind of thing I love to do, and am good at. And better still - it had nothing to do with Windows CE.
When Matt came to bed last night, he said something to me - I'm not entirely certain what, since I was sound asleep.
But apparently my sleeping mind decided that since he was talking to me, it must be morning. I mumbled something and had begun to get up when Matt said, "Sweetie, it's not time to get up."
"It isn't?" I shoved my pillow out of the way so I could look at the alarm clock. It took a moment for my sleep-fogged brain to register the time.
Actually, it never did really register. I can remember it was a little after 1, and I can remember trying to figure out from that how long it would be until the alarm went off and being unable to do so.
I think maybe a nap is in order, when I get home from work today.
Word of the Day:
circadian - being, having, characterized by, or occurring in approximately 24-hour periods or cycles (as of biological activity or function)
Currently Reading:
- Dragon by Steven Brust
Current Projects:
- drawing
- Kris' afghan
- Hall stuff