Friday, in a sprit of Go-Gettum Up & Attom dynasism I decided that this – *this – was the weekend. It was the weekend where anything could happen. It was the weekend where the world was my oyster. It was the weekend in which the world would beg on the doorstep for my time, and I would look down upon the world and say “no, world. I will not give you my time today” because today was The Day.
I would tidy my room.
Friday night I started with Point 1. I moved my computer into the lounge, set it up, and watched DVDs with LoneCat. We watched Blade, which was vampiric, full of some stupid plot holes, but fun.
Saturday was a veritable torrent of exciting activity, consisiting of shifting around clothes! Putting books away! Heaping bits of A4 paper into piles! Lifting up the bed! Laundry! Yay!
LoneCat, my wonderful girlfriend, is allergic to dust. Academically, I know this. If you were to give me a recipe which she would eat, and you said “Potatoes, Ham, Chilli, Raw tomatoes and Dust”, I’d say “eww” and “LoneCat is allergic to dust” (Also that she hates both raw tomatoes and chilli, in fact). See? I know this. LoneCat is allergic to dust. Dust Bad. Evil. Wrong. And probably part of the Axis Of Evil.
This, however, totally escaped my mind while I was shifting stuff around and raising bloody great clouds of the stuff. Well, not bloody great clouds. I’m allergic to dust too, though not to the same degree. LoneCat, however, went though more hankies than the average… er… something that goes though a great deal of hankies indeed, and had to escape to somewhere else for several hours. Then came back. Then had to remain in the garden for several more hours, whilst I felt incresingly guilty for causing this.
And watching anime. Guilt and Anime are a great combination.
Eventually she came back in, and we ordered pizza and watched DVDs (Serendipdy, which I can’t spell, and can’t currently look up for reasons that will become apparent later. It’s a good film, and has both John Cusack and Kate Beckensale, whose name I also can’t spell, in it). Now, you may consider that for this stupid forgetting-girlfriend-allergy stuff, I was a bad boyfriend. This I would agree with, but I made up for it in the “Catching Evil Spiders Bent On Ceiling Domination” stakes. Slightly. Back to the story:
Sunday came, and with it the second part of the tidying, The Great Quest to get several thousand bits of A4 paper into some kind of order. For this I sorted out every bit of paper into one of about a million piles, bought stationary, forgot which piles were which, worked it out, filed the bits of paper, and felt confidant in a Job Well Done, with a New Organisational System for paperwork in place, and only slightly aware that for every new organisational system for bits of paper I devise – at the rate of one every year or so – it takes about three weeks before it devolves back into the far simpler “That’s a bit of paper, it goes in that box” system that’s served me badly the previous 22 years.
Having tidied everything away (except the bits I’m too lazy to tidy away) the almost-final (I’ve still got a six foot pile of laundry to deal with) part of the exercise: Putting my computer back in my room. Lift, strain, plug, fiddle, plug, switch. Bother.
Hard Drives are wonderfully versitle things, you know. Mine, for example, is amazing, and decided to demonstrate for me exactly how amazing it really is. My magical hard drive can do impressions. It started with an impression of a hard-drive starting up.
‘Click.’ it said, smuggly. ‘Wrrrrrr’
Well done, I said. You’re a good little hard-drive.
‘Click.’ it added. ‘Wrrrrrr’
Yes, thankyou. You’ve done that bit, now the next bit please.
Quoth the hard-drive ‘Click’ and ‘Wrrrrrr’
Damn. I open the case to look at the wires. Fiddle with plugs at random.
‘Click’ says the hard-drive. ‘Wrrrrr’ it adds.
‘Wrrrrrrr’ it continues.
“Welcome to Windows XP” says Maelstrom, my computer.
“Pheww” says Aquarion, Maelstrom’s operator.
“For my next trick” says the hard-drive, basking in the applause, “I will do an impression of a meat grinder”
‘Grrrrrr’ performs the hard-drive.
“Argh” says the computer, and shits itself.
Sorry. resets itself.
‘Argh’ says the Aquarion. “Darn”, he adds, with classical quotation mark meanings.
Upon restart, the hard-drive performs it’s little trick again. And again. And again. Safe mode doesn’t help. Nothing helps.
Fortunatly, this computer duel boots to Gentoo Linux. Less fortunatly, I haven’t finished installing Gentoo on it, and have lost the startup CD. So I am currently sshed from Maelstrom, which was booted from a SUSE install CD, which is currently running the Gentoo bootstrapping process.
For those who have less linux-fu, You may need to know that Gentoo is special in that it compiles everything for itself. Installing Gentoo properly on a 1800XP Athlon – to pick a random example – can take anything up to four days. Esspecially if you install KDE.
Fortunatly I just have to install enough to access the other HDD to see if it’s completely sodded, or if I just need to reinstall Windows. I really sincerly hope it’s the latter.
Wish me luck…