computer death and annoying reading material

1. The Österbotten accent sounds weirdly like Finnish-Swedish crossed with Norwegian, the cadence and melody. It's very syncopated compared with the ordinary dialect spoken by wax_jism's family and I find my brother-outlaw's (affianced) brother-in-law Kim practically incomprehensible when he's, uh, talking normally and not, like, deliberately enunciating like, for talking to the babies.

2. Yesterday Wax bought the wrong kind of memory for her computer. I still have only 1 gig so she said we might as well put it in my box. "I don't really need any more memory," I said dubiously, but she was like, "You can always use more memory," and hey, 2gb is kind of general standard even for LAPTOPS now, so. I put it in. But when I closed the box back up... my processor wouldn't start. Since the only thing besides the memory chip that was touched/changed in any way were the power supply cables, this is stressful and utterly baffling: the power source and processor fans start, the motherboard LEDs come on, but the processor doesn't start and neither does the HD (and we checked/jiggled everything, yes, many times). So... hopefully Brother Linux will be coming to take a look at that tomorrow?

3. While stressing over that I decided to just take the Proofreading Job That Pissed Me The Fuck Off with me to Brother Windows's place today for a big 6-adult babysitting party (it's much more relaxing for each individual adult that way, trust me. Plus Wax doesn't really do much if any actual work with any of the actual children, she was just tagging along for the most part). And so we plugged Clem the FrankenComp into our new modem (which isn't broken, so you know... WIN) and... discovered that while I had the internet I didn't have access to the LAN and couldn't send the proofing files from there to the laptop! I ended up emailing them to myself, but then we couldn't get into the network from Brother Windows's place anyway.

4. I picked up sort of at random one of Kathy Reichs's mystery novels, the ones that Bones is based on, because I needed a book suddenly and it seemed like the best option in the bookstore that I didn't already own a copy of at home. And okay, I mean, she's got the expertise for providing the background information for Bones, but it kind of saddens me deeply that Reichs has ever been an International #1 Bestseller. Granted her heroine is less... annoying than Patricia Cornwell's surreally neurotic wishy-washy emo twit, but that's not really hard to manage, is it? And she's definitely afflicted with that "I'm so down to earth that the only makeup I wear is MASCARA!!! And I go RUNNING, and I HAVE NO ILLUSIONS about my own attractiveness so you see I am SUPER-REALISTIC, yet all these men are kind of fighting over me and now plz to watch me waffle about them for the next four books"... Hard-Boiled Female Investigator Syndrome. Yet this pales in comparison to the writing, or lack thereof. Oh man, the one-word sentences. So many sentence fragments! A friend offered I stared into his eyes. Brown. as an example of the typical One Word Sentence, but this book provided me a new favourite example: "Yes?" Icy. She also has a methodical-not-natural writer's inherent stiffness and jerkiness of pacing, with bizarrely detailed step-by-step descriptions of the procedures involved in such relevant tasks as taking a shower, making a sandwich, or sitting on a countertop, while skimming over potentially interesting or relevant information such as the investigation. Some of the latter skimming is misguided coyness as opposed to cluelessness ("I couldn't believe my eyes. Read again. And again. This was big. Huge. Colossal. Definitely surprising. It was a big piece of news. You, the reader, would definitely want to know it. Too bad. Next chapter, suckah!"). It's not rare for me to read to the end of mediocre writing of this type, and Reichs's plotting is far better than most, but you know, usually I haven't paid 10 bucks for the priviledge...

how did i offend the gods of computers? HOW?

Brother Linux thinks it's probably my motherboard that's the problem. My rather awesome, not even one year old motherboard.

But it's possible that the problem is the powersource, even though it is somewhat working.

So we have to:

1. Borrow a motherboard from someone and hook my powersource to it, to see if the powersource works


2. Connect Wax's powersource to my motherboard, to see if the motherboard works

And then we will know what to replace. Dammit.

Meanwhile there's my harddrive, which we are going to have to connect to Wax's computer if we don't fix this soon, because not only have I not backed up my bookmarks or music in a couple of months, the last scene I wrote in my current Batman/Gordon wip is there, and not up to date on any of the other computers in the LAN (I've been backing it up on the laptop¹ and Wax's machine semi-frequently for mobile writing and feedback respectively). I really want to write now and my story is stuck on my dead computer ARGH.

1. I know Wax named this laptop Wesley, but I am just not down with that; it's too generic and not immediately suggestive of the intended character, besides which the laptop doesn't resemble said character in my view. It feels more like a Picard to me, so that's what I'm going to call it from now on. Picard. Wax's machine is Athena and mine was Psyche in the last incarnation, but on next reinstall will be dubbed Leia to go with Darth the monitor. Windows machines always receive male names because Windows is clunky, assholey and a bit dim.

on the plus side (non computer-related)

But did I mention that baby bought me tickets to Emilie Autumn at Tavastia in Helsinki on Oct 21? It's a small venue (according to Wax) of 1000 people or something, which to me does not sound small, but I suppose in the world of gig-jargon "small" means "not a stadium". So, it's, y'know, a club. I have been devoting a certain amount of mental energy per day to determining what I am going to wear to the concert. (Shut up.)

And! I finally got the 4 o'clock EP, which I cannot upload yet because it is on my hd attached to my dead computer. And CDON finally got their shipment of the new Bohemian Rhapsody/Girls Just Wanna Have Fun EP (she should cover EVERYTHING, every genre, on harpsichord and electric violin! I would buy it ALL) and I have ordered it! With any luck I'll have it before the end of the week, although their processing time was a bit high on the last order...