obfuscational hazard

It’s amazing how great you can feel after ten hours of sleep, Monkey Keys. Sure my PC was in pieces all over the drawing room floor, but I was sleep privileged. Better yet, soon I’d be at work where my colleagues could undoubtedly find me a disk.

January 25, 2010: Hour 21

I was able to procure several floppies, and I announced I would be leaving at lunch to further troubleshoot. The clock was ticking. That very night I had a scheduled Team Fortress Two event with many of these same co-workers. My very reputation as a techie was at stake. I felt confident though. After all, I had brought an ancient Fintstone era PC back from the brink of death the night before. Surely the destruction of this stupid little house in the middle of the highway would be child’s play in comparison.

“You should be careful, Dylan. Arrogance breads bad karma.” Your FACE breads bad karma, Mystic Key.

January 25, 2010: Hour 25

Ancient tech in hand, I approached Fred. Surgical equipment lay strewn about the operation site from the night before. He still booted fine, and I was even able to install HUGEPOS on him with no incident.

See, I told you this would be easy.

“Karma…”

I popped disk one into the drive and went to format it. For the non techs, this is a way of writing an instruction manual on a new disk for the computer to read. Computers are like trained monkeys sans the fez. As such, they have no clue what to do when given something fresh out of a store wrapper. They generally try to eat it. So I was explaining to Fred the disk would need to hold a wrecking ball capable of destroying a little house in the middle of the highway between me and my stuff.

I very gently tapped Fred on his shoulder twice and tried to tell this to him. He blinked repeatedly at me with the brain damaged look of the majority share holder at Norton.

“Oooooo, sounds kinda like…” You shut your font, Taunt Key!

January 25, 2010: Hour 26

I’m sure I was audible by aliens thus far unreached by the SETI project when I screamed in Fred’s face. I set about the usual vein troubleshooting. Maybe a different disk would work? Do I just need to reseat the drive? Are my BIOS settings correct? Is there something wrong with the floppy drivers?

Fred laughed at each of my ideas to find any rational explanation behind his sudden inability to do the one basic function I needed. Out of desperation, I tried running HUGEPOS to put the wrecking ball on an unformatted disk. HUGEPOS joined in Fred’s laughter. Then Fred asked HUGEPOS on a date, and HUGEPOS agreed.

The two decided the movies were rather cliché for their first time out, so instead they went to the park. It was cold, of course. The deep freeze didn’t matter though. Whenever HUGEPOS gazed longingly into Fred’s eyes, there was magic.

The two had a lovely dinner at a small, family owned Italian place. Fred had the lasagna since it was the only thing on the menu he could actually pronounce. HUGEPOS called him out on this, and the two started laughing. It was at that moment that Fred wondered if he was in love.

It was only the first date, but they had so much in common. They were nearly the same age. They both hated doing their job. They both loved blinking repeatedly at me with the brain damaged look of any woman who would willingly marry anyone on the HUGEPOS staff.

Fred was taking a huge risk here, but he had to say something. He swallowed a bit of sourdough bread, and boldly cleared his throat. HUGEPOS looked up in anticipation.

“Windows was unable to complete the format.”

I took out my José Canseco bat and swung with the force of a thousand suns into the side of Fred. Bits of motherboard and case showered the room in a techno glitter. He coughed out a blue screen once, and then there was silence.

January 25, 2010: Hour 28

“You KILLED Fred!?” Alright, relax, Humanitarian Key. I was only imagining. In reality I gave up and wrote part one of this story. The only thing I hadn’t tried was using an entirely different floppy drive, and there was no way I’d find anyone with that. I was doomed.

Or was I?

In the midst of writing part one, I received a text from one of the Team Fortress Keys. He had a USB floppy drive I could try! I was running out of time, but told him I would stop by his house when he got home to pick it up. If this didn’t work, I would be forced to play on his old PC and suffer the humiliation.

January 25, 2010: Hour 30

With an hour to go, and a new floppy drive in my hands, I powered up my laptop. This was going to work. A few clicks later, and my laptop was formatting a floppy disk. I gave Fred a quick kick for good measure. He had it coming… karma.

HUGEPOS even cooperated by properly making its wrecking ball. I was elated. All I needed to do was plug the USB floppy drive into my new PC and run the boot disk. I’d make Team Fortress 2. I’d be a hero!

I raced to my PC and virtually slammed the drive in the back. That little house was going to get it now. I was going to atom smash it into oblivion forever. The machine booted into the disk. I selected the wrecking ball. Adios house! I hit enter.

It blinked repeatedly at me with the brain damaged look of the tattered remnants of my sanity. The house remained, and I’m fairly confident HUGEPOS and Fred were celebrating their honeymoon inside.

I could have dropkicked the monitor I suppose. I did the next best thing. I went to my friend’s house to play on his old PC. Mine remained dead, and I had failed.

What an awesome play on words to start off the new year, Monkey Keys! It has been nearly forever, and I have no one to blame but myself. You have my solemn promise, though, that I shall always update eventually, because I love you. Like all emotionally abusive relationships where you keep crawling back for more, I will continue to give you just enough assurance where you’ll stay with me instead of going to the twice as attractive, better listening blog about floral arrangements. Eat THAT FloralCraftResource.com.

“That was beautiful, Dylan.” Thanks, Fatty Key. You should go on a diet.

“I… ok…” So, where was I? For those Keys who aren’t aware, in reality I am a computer guy. I know, I don’t get it either. I spend all my working hours trying to get stupid combinations of 1’s and 0’s to talk to each other in some language other than projectile vomit. This normally requires quite a few cuss words and objects capable of taking a tumultuous thrashing.

Suffice it to say, by the time my weekend rolls around I am plagued and comatose of working with machines. That is precisely why my latest endeavor with my personal PC was so flipping annoying. I remember it as if it were yesterday…

January 24, 2010: Hour 0

It all started as I was setting up my PC from a recent LAN party. I had purchased a new hard drive several weeks prior because of an ominous clicking noise my computer had taken to emitting. I feared the hard drive may soon crash. (For the non-tech reader, this means I lose all my photos and e-mails. Yes that can happen, and no I will not back up your files.) Because I was being extra proactive, I purchased this new hard drive with the intent of moving all my files to it. Thus, all my precious stuff would be safe from the failing hardware.

Since I was extra motivated that day, I decided to go forward with the copy. I spent several minutes searching online for the best tool to clone one’s hard drive for free. My search landed me on an older Norton product, Ghost 2003 (henceforth known as ‘Highly Unreliable Gamble Effectively Purged Own System’ or HUGEPOS).

HUGEPOS is relatively straightforward. You’re asked to select a source and a destination hard drive. Then you click a little clone button, and the software reboots and copies one drive to another. In theory.

In really, HUGEPOS does the exact opposite of what it is supposed to do and DESIMATES both hard drives. Here’s how it goes down in non-computer terms.

HUGEPOS rebooted my computer and then made itself a house. This house is right in the middle of the highway between me and my stuff. Because this house is there, I can’t get to any of my stuff without first bulldozing through the house. The house is suppose to go away as soon as my stuff is all nice and copied. The problem here is my stuff did not copy because HUGEPOS is a huge POS.

My stuff did not copy because HUGEPOS was too old and did not understand what my newfangled hard drive was. So, instead of copying my hard drive, or moving its stupid house off the road, it blinked at me with the brain damaged look of a computer programmer who I hit repeatedly with a bat for inventing HUGEPOS.

January 24, 2010: Hour 1

At first I didn’t realized the massive trouble I was in. Oh sure, HUGEPOS didn’t actually do its job, but I was unaware of this whole “house in the road” situation. So I did what any good techie would do and rebooted my computer again. Instead of booting to Windows like a good PC, I was presented with the black and white letters of HUGEPOS asking to try the copy again. I told it no. It blinked repeatedly at me with the brain damaged look of the project leader who oversaw the creation of HUGEPOS.

No matter, thought I. I’ll simply reboot again and quit out of HUGEPOS before it starts. This proved impossible. Now I was nervous.

I sprang into action on my spare laptop and Googled the issue. I found many people had this issue with HUGEPOS. Apparently it was common for Norton products in general to be huge worthless pos’s. There was a solution; According to Norton themselves, if I broke into a window on this house in the middle of the highway, I could sneak through a back door and get to my stuff.

So, I broke into the window and snuck into the house. Inside, there was a startling sight; I saw HUGEPOS blinking repeatedly with the brain damaged look of the marketing executive who thought a picture of a PC’s ghost should inspire confidence in the product not killing your PC.

January 24, 2010: Hour 3

Now things were getting desperate. This ridiculous house in the middle of the highway was NOT moving. I had tried every way of bypassing it with the computer alone. The next step, according to dedicated forum crawlers, was to use a boot disk. Yes, that’s right, a floppy disk. You know, one of those things that no computer or laptop has had a drive for since 1999. They’re small, square, and vaguely resemble something I want to heave across the room. Apparently, if I made this disk it would act like a wrecking ball against this stupid house in the middle of the highway between me and my stuff. There was a problem though.

I had no floppy drive on my PC. So I tried to make a boot CD instead. To do this at all, I had to install HUGEPOS on my laptop.

January 24, 2010: Hour 5

After finally getting a working version of HUGEPOS downloaded and installed again, I entered the boot disk utility. This had an option to make a bootable CD. Hallelujah! I set to work making one right away …only… what is this? It asks me to insert a floppy disk. Well that did confuse me since I was under the impression we were making CDs here.

I checked online.

“Oh yes,” says the forums. “The option to make a bootable CD requires a floppy.” I stared at the laptop screen, blinking repeatedly with the brain damaged look of someone who just read “The option to create a bootable CD requires a floppy.”

January 24, 2010: Hour 6

It had become apparent to me I NEEDED a floppy drive to make this boot disk to get rid of this stupid house in the middle of the highway between me and my stuff. I had one option; on my old PC that had been mostly dead for years sat a neglected floppy drive. I could not hook this up to my laptop, since laptops and PC components are racist against one another. I could not hook this to my poor disheveled PC since I was unable to boot into Windows to make the disk. My only option was to resurrect my old PC. I had to bring my old PC back to life in order to make a wrecking ball boot disk to destroy the stupid house sitting in the middle of the highway between me and my stuff.

I hit the power button on my old PC. It did not turn on.

January 24, 2010: Hour 9

It’s funny how angry you can get at inanimate things when they seem to be “winning.” Here I was nine hours into my repair efforts (which, I will remind you, were all started by trying to PREVENT this type of thing from happening) and nothing was working. My new PC, my old PC and my laptop all seemed to be laughing at me and pointing their twisted RAM in my direction.

“HAHAHAHAHA, U c@n’ts f1x d3m Pr0b13mZ!!! ZOMG L0LZZZZZZZZZ!”

Shut up, PC. I made you what you are, and I can destroy you.

“NOPE! Iz @11r3dy the DEAD!”

The blasted thing was right. It was right until I finally isolated the last problem, and the old girl sprang to life. I had brought my old PC back online! Now I just needed to install HUGEPOS for a THIRD time and make a boot disk!

Disk… that’s when it dawned on me. I had no disks.

I could have cried I suppose. I did the next best thing. At 9:00 PM eastern standard time, I went to sleep.