Screw you

So my landlord woke up and realized there is a problem. With Smoking Woman.

A new security door will be ordered, at our expense of course, but hey, it will eliminate the noise from the stairwell (though I will miss being able to hear Sport Fanatic neighbour scream like Homer).

Also they will measure if the pressure in our apartment is too low, thus allowing Smoking Woman's evil vapors to encroach on our peace of mind. The ventilation, which dates from the sixties and was probably designed in the darkest regions of the Soviet Union, might have to be tweaked. I fully expect this to be perfomed by some long dead service person, brought back to a semblance of life by one of the many necromancers I am sure are in our landlord's employ.

And yes, I'm not writing as much as I would want to. I hope to change that after this weekend when my laptop is back in the game. Words. Do come easy to me.

On the road

Driving through a fallish Sweden, going south to visit one of our customer service sites. Last night I had to get up and air out our bedroom because of Smoking Woman. At half past eleven I got up again and wrote our landlord an angry email. Waiting for an answer. I am pretty much prepared to go to war over this...

Better to be a geek than an idiot

The laptop remains dead. Why? I brought it back to work, having proven that I don't deserve a hardware geek badge. Ze geeks looked at the harddrive, and exclaimed "This isn't European!".

Which meant ix-nay on the ires-way. The option presented to me was to buy an adapter. On eBay. From Korea. Mmm...no. I turned to the Other Geeks.

See, there's a difference. I always start with the geeks that work tech support. Those geeks talk to our customers on a daily basis, and have at least the semblance of social skills. In the bowels of our office there's a whole other breed of geek, that only speak in BASIC, and firmly believe that graphic user interfaces are for amateurs.

I used to work there, though I've never been able to reach those levels of geekiness. I've moved on to work at Marketing, which is a major faux pas if you're a geek. I've sort of been able to get away with it, and I still hear "you used to work at Networks so you should understand this" at meetings. Most of them believe it's only a matter of time before I show up for work wearing a suit and tie, with a clean-shaven chin. Oh the horror.

So I went down there, maneuvering between full-sized Stormtrooper cutouts, piles of discarded servers and pinball machines. But not really. The pinball machines are in the basement, the servers are stacked against the walls so you don't have to walk around them, and the Stormtrooper cutout is...well, that's actually there.

All your Deathstars are belong to me

They rolled their eyes when I said "Windows". They rolled them again as I said "service pack". They smiled smugly as I said "laptop crash". Then they said "mini OS on a USB stick".

That was Friday. Monday and Tuesday I'm off to customer service for meetings. So on Wednesday I should be rebooting my laptop from a USB stick, and saving the files I haven't backed up. Goodness.

Oh. And I've learnt that in Latvian "Internet" is "Internets". And "Vista" is "chicken". Suddenly a lot of things make more sense.

Boy, I guess you picked the wrong train

I have an hour-long commute to and from work. In the mornings, it's OK. I read, I listen to music, I wake up properly. Or go into the commute coma, which isn't OK, but better than the ride home.

Going from work is hell. I almost always travel during rush hour, so there are all these people around to annoy me. Why can't people just stay home when I go out? Today a woman sat down across from me on the train, and within thirty seconds she tapped me on the leg. I removed my headphones, and she asked me to turn the music down.

What. The. Fuck.

Next to us were two teenage girls, talking and laughing, loudly. Further down a baby was screaming. And she asks me to turn the music down?

I told her that if she had a problem with the volume she could just move. Then I put my headphones back on and resumed my reading. I was tempted to find the most bass heavy track I could, and turn the volume all the way up.

I realize people can find music spilling out of headphones irritating. I don't care. If that makes me an asshole, so be it. Again: I don't care. If you have a problem with noise, stay indoors. Or wear earplugs. Squealing teenage girls and all them annoying children/babies/toddlers/goblins are much worse noise pollutants anyway.

I would love to stand here and talk with you... but I'm not going to.

But really, I am.

We decided to fry up some shrimp and halloumi today, and build us some serious sandwiches. When we visited New Orleans in April, we bought a jar of Frank Davis Stricly N'Awlins Barbecued Shrimp Seasoning (try saying that five times in a row, really fast). We've only used it in minor quantities until now.

Tonight eighteen shrimp went in a bag, which I held while Mah Girl poured some seasoning over them. A great big gout of spices exploded into the bag. And out of the bag.

Let me put it this way. I doubt the New Orleans police department uses Mace or pepper spray to subdue criminals. Instead, they visit Frank Davis once a year, buy a truckload of his seasoning, and load up their spray cans. If someone ever tries to invade my home, I know what I'm arming myself with.

The laptop remains dead. Three geeks with oceans and oceans of PC know-how looked at it, hummed and hawed and concluded that the only thing I can do is reinstall Windows (the power of Christ compels you!).

It's not really this broken.

I have been a Good Boy and done backups regularly on an external harddrive, and them geeks supplied me with a bagfull of wires and gizmos so I can pull the drive and extract whichever files aren't backed up, since reinstalling Windows will wipe all of it. I tried today, but couldn't even figure out which wire goes into which part of the drive. And I'm supposed to be a technical boy (again with the microwave). For shame.

Tomorrow I bring all of it to work again, and hope that The Mighty Morphin' Power Geeks can help me, hands-on. Fingers crossed, y'all.

We apologize for the inconvenience but Windows did not start successfully

*insert long string of curse words here*

I've been using an LG laptop for almost two years now. A fairly powerful but above all portable little friend, that can go with me on writing excursions. Today I downloaded the latest XP upgrade, and now the fucker (as in Windows, not the laptop) won't start properly.

*insert another long string of curse words here*

And while I am, in many ways, both a geek and a technical boy, error handling for PCs is not my forte (and as we all know, not for microwaves either). I have now spent 45 minutes trying to figure out what's wrong, and the only thing I do know is that a lot of other people have similar problems after installing the upgrade. However, exchanges on geek forums quickly get a wee bit too technical for me, so I'm just going to sulk and wait until tomorrow when I can have a real computer geek look at it, at work.

I work with a lot of geeks. Or at least I used to. Now I'm in Sales & Marketing, though still with the word "technical" in my job description, but previously I was below decks in the network department for five years. Some of the people that work there make me look and feel like I don't know which end is up on a laptop. Or an SS7 network, for that matter. Tomorrow I will aim their geekiness at my beloved laptop. A pox on Microsoft in case my geeks can't solve my problem. Well, a pox either way, but an especially virulent one if my laptop be dead.

Heeeeere’s Beardo!

“Internet at home free workweek” was sort of a success. I was home sick two days, and couldn’t stay away completely. But outside office hours I was a good boy, and apart from the post below, which was sent from my phone, I didn’t write anything here at all. Yay for me!

Mmmm...madness...

Now, to be honest, if I were forced to go without Internet access or (horror of horrors) my cellphone for an extended period of time, I would probably freak out like Johnny here.

Hectic weeks ahead. All sorts of activities planned, from visits to our customer service to nerdiness to watching friends play live. On October 4th I’ll be playing some CDs when some other friends support M.A.N. Again, yay for me!

The mighty Come Sleep at KGB.
Jesper from Fingerspitzengefühl to the right.