At work, when the (college) student workers cannot resolve an issue, I’m the last stop in our support line. As a result, I sometimes get computers for which there is nothing we can do about it. For example, I had two Acer desktops a couple weeks ago, nearly the same model, crash and these came into the office. Everything I tried didn’t get the computers working, but part of that is due to the fact that the CDs provided consistently encountered errors; all other hardware appeared to function correctly. I had to tell the students that the computers needed more work than we could do, and fortunately, one of the computers was still under warranty. Today I had a student pick up another laptop which had, from what I could tell, a dead hard drive, as a spare hard drive was detected by the system in BIOS, whereas the original was not.
That’s one of the most frustrating things I have to deal with when working on someone else’s computer: having to be right about what I’m telling them. I mean, I don’t have to be right, but I don’t feel right telling them something that might be false. It’s part of the reason that fixing a computer with an issue, or even correctly diagnosing the issue, is such an accomplishment; it gives me something to push off of. At least I’ll be 1-1 this week, as the second computer is working, and should be back with the student tomorrow.
Today I came across garfield minus garfield, and I find it to be one of the most amusing things I’ve seen in a while. The page begins the following:
Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?
Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.
While glancing over my feeds at work, I saw an article on Ars Technica titled Ars System Guide: it’s easy being green, and I found it to be a worthwhile read. In the future, when Meghan finally needs a new computer for real, and not some Frankensteinian computer that’s been brought back from the brink of death multiple times, I’ll re-read this article and then go find some more up-to-date ones to read. Since her HP Pavilion is going on seven years or so, it probably is not very efficient at it’s power usage, and it does use a wonderful CRT monitor and, due to the cobbled-together parts, it has two internal hard drives and also uses an external one as well, so those use power and create heat. On a related note, she was trying to find some files that weren’t on the backup I had made, and so I plugged in the old hard drive that was suffering from the click-of-death. Apparently, leaving it alone for a handful of weeks has made it work, or at least it worked for the 10 minutes I had it connected.
One thing we’ve been doing is trying to find ways to re-wire some of the electronics so they go through surge protectors so that a switch can kill the entire power draw of those items. While we’ve done this with the computers, we just did this with most of the items in the “entertainment center” in the living room. Personally, I consider my computer to my entertainment center, but that’s just me. Anyway, the DVD player, Wii, and television are now on a power strip so that they can be turned off to stop any power draw when not in use. Another minor thing that we’ve been making sure to do is to unplug any power adapters that are not being used to charge a device, namely the cellphones, but also for the battery charger and iPods.
Now that we have our IRS return, I’m debating whether or not to get something like the Kill-A-Watt to help determine other ways to decrease power usage in our apartment. Fortunately, there aren’t too many items in the apartment for us to worry about, and the skylights really help with keeping the place lit up through most of the day.
We’ve started to get Dunkin’ Donuts commercials in the area as of late, but I can’t think of one in the immediate area. There’s one they’re playing now that is about a year old, but it’s commonly referred to as “Fritalian”, and it is pretty much a jab at the crazy names some places use for coffee drinks was rather amusing. I’ve embedded it below on the off chance you haven’t seen it. However, I’d like to take the time to comment on one of the drinks listed, at about 9 seconds, and again at 14 seconds: Himan Plu Cento.
Got that? Himan Plu Cento.
Do you see what I’m getting at? Try saying it fast. When you get to the point where ‘himan’ sounds like ‘human’ and ‘plu’ and ‘cento’ start merging into one word, you’re there. Try ordering one of those next time you’re at a coffee store.
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