That’s exactly what my 1973 (74?) ice storm looked like. Real purty, until you try to travel anywhere.
I agree, but there’s nasty and there’s nasty. IMO, if you know a person, however tangentially–currently in your life, then it’s ok to ask a civil question about that person. If you haven’t thought about this person or seen them or spoken to them (even thought you live in the same town!) for 30+ years, then asking about a personal detail about their life is just nasty gossip.
Certainly I am sad or happy to find out about an old classmate, but this woman wasn’t even that to me.
The verdict of Bitch stands. <bangs gavel> Next!
I also hate stats. My daughter seems to like it, though-weird un-me gene, there!
Hank - Frustrating … yes. This is the polite word for it.
gotti - Despite the aloof and cloistered system a laptop is, I find it odd that Windows was even attempting to communicate with a device that was no longer present; it usually detects these things. That one would have me scratching my head, too.
rosie - Macs have their own error messages, but since being based on Linux they’re still pretty damn stable machines. My XP installation is also normally quite stable. It has the occasional blonde moment, perhaps, but nothing particularly problematic. This is why I knew something rather serious was afoot when I kept getting repeated BSODs. I’m pretty good at keeping crap out of my system and maintaining a good balance between performance and bling without compromising system integrity, so when events start taking a sharp left turn like this, I know something is seriously rotten somewhere in Denmark. (Just where the hell did this phrase come from, anyway, and what do the Danes have to do with it?)
Sean - My first piece of advice: Never perform an upgrade install. You end up importing many of the problems into the new OS, and potentially create new ones. This wasn’t a huge deal with 95->98 or 98->SE, or even 98/SE->ME (though if your problems were so bad you felt the need to buy Windows ME, you were already a lost cause) but XP was a radical shift in design, so all manner of silly buggers can crop up. I can’t say whether or not a repair install will do the trick, but it’s non-destructive (meaning as long as the reinstall goes as planned you don’t lose any data or installed prorgams), so it’s always worth a shot. The repair install can be accessed this way:
■ Insert your Windows XP CD and boot from it. If your system BIOS is not set to include your CD or DVD-ROM as the primary boot device, you may need to go into your BIOS to change it, making your hard drive the second boot device in the chain.
■ Allow XP to go through the initial setup phase.
■ When you are asked to choose which partition you want to install XP on, select the one it’s already installed to. On the following screen you’ll be notified that there is an existing installation already present and be given the option to install over top of it or to repair the existing installation. Press “R” to repair.
■ XP will now go through the same process it does on a new or formatted system. It will now basically re-initialize itself, with the exception that it will not overwrite any of your existing installed software, nor will it re-initialize the registry. Instead, it will just reinstall all of its core components, and re-install drivers for all detected hardware and set up your network again.
■ You may need to do some upgrade maintenance after it is completed. This includes installing any newer device drivers (sound, video, motherboard, etc.), Windows Update patches, service packs (if your Windows CD does not already include them) and so on.
Mama Tigs - Great pictures. We’ve got a whole bunch from the Ice Storm of '99 when MindWife’s mother was up in Smith’s Falls, ON (near Ottawa and Quebec) visiting some relatives. It was like Mother Nature dipped several hundred square miles of land in several hundred coats of shellac.
Stop it with the ice storm stories! I’ll start having flashbacks to 2003, when we were buried in ice, the power was out for a week and I had to flee to my mother’s house, 70 miles away. (she now lives here)
Anyway, the city didn’t dig out until April, which is when all the branches from the broken trees were removed. I was undergoing my own personal nervous breakdown at the time (divorce) and then Mother Nature has to dump ice on my misery. I’m still not over it!
(Thankfully, my now-husband sauntered into my life later in the year, which pretty much turned 2003 from The Year from Hell into The Year I Became Happy, Finally) 
Have a look at Device Manager’s “non-present” devices view some time and look at all of the Ghosts of Peripherals Past. Here’s where you’ll find remants of every USB drive that’s ever been plugged in, as well as printers, that video card you replaced last year and stuff like that.
BTDT. I use it to clear out all those “phantom” devices from time to time because, left to their own devices (heh) they can eventually cause problems and conflicts despite the fact that they’re not supposed to exist.
I’m an engineer and I like numbers but I still hate stats.
Where are **swampy ** and **Drae ** with updates on their interviews??
Now you tell me. But you know, I never heard that from anyone until after I started doing the updates.
I have an HP Pavillion desktop system that I bought from on office supply retailer. I have no XP discs. Or if I do, they have been misfiled since I’ve moved twice since I bought the thing. But I will look.
I don’t know about Drae, but swampy said he’d be spending the night away from homme because he has a job interview in the city first thing tomorrow morning.
Back to work today - I saw where a few trees had fallen along the way, but overall, our county got thru the storm unscathed. The roads were completely dry this morning.
**FCD ** drove all the way to Goddard only to discover they were closed till noon, and he got there at 6:30. So he came home. That’s two trips there and back for nothing. They owe him a fill-up.
Class is back on tonight. But first, **FCD ** is taking me out to dinner. Yay! So in a little bit, I’m going to change into class clothes, then we’ll go have Bad Chinese.
Yep, exciting life I’ve got here…
Sean - Upgrade installs are more often problematic than not. Even when they are not, you typically end up with an underperforming system due to remnants of the old system being left behind. However, even if you could find those HP discs, it probably won’t do any good. Those prefab system discs were typically bundled with restore discs rather than real XP discs, the difference being that restore discs are generally (sometimes actually) Norton Ghost-type system restoration images.
I have mancleaned the apartment, and did the quarterly carpet steam cleaning(Maggie sometimes forgets whether it’s go on the paper or don’t go on the paper. :smack: ). A jambalaya like substance is cooking on the stove. Tonight is Hockey Night in Carolina.
MamaTigs, that looks pretty, if if doesn’t happen to you.
Mork, that’s weird. Of course my DSL modem won’t connect via Ethernet after a power flicker. USB works though.
Interesting typo.
Back from Bad Chinese and about to leave for class. For the record, Scruffy is insane. I brought out the vacuum cleaner, and she proceeded to attack it before I even plugged it in. The attack continued as I vacuumed the residue from a dumped-over trash can.
Truly insane…
And now, I’m outta here.
swampy, thanks for the anti-valentine’s link. It made my day.
Mork and Mamatigs, wow, those are on my list of terrifying things–losing power and having my computer crash. I’m glad you were both able to handle your crises a lot better than I could have.
It’s a beautiful day here–70 degrees F and forecast this way for a couple more days, I think. I’m trying to get myself going, but I think I’m stuck in an endless loop. Reading all your stories motivates me, so thanks for that.
The computers being down were (Was? Were? I can’t figure out which one is right there) the least of our problems! Though it’s true that if I’d had everything but heat I’d have been somewhat happier…then again, naaah, I’d have been just as pissed about that alone as I was about a bunch of stuff not working.
Wow. I know it sucked being without power, but the pics were pretty!
I’m free! I don’t have to work with Neurotic Co-Worker until Monday! I don’t have to work tomorrow! I’m so happy!
Now to laze around. I might wash the dishes. Maybe.
I brought work home today but I’m not doing any of it. I’m gonna play around here and be a Good Doper for a bit, maybe read some and have a beerverage or more.
Um…computer illiterate over here. It says I have stuff on my clipgboard, and do I want that stuff available in other ways (modes?) something–I said yes.
What the hell is it talking about? I sent a file into school, like always… 
BTW, I have Word on a MacBook. If that helps. (does it help?)
off to bed. My shoulders and neck still ache from the snow. I think I messed up a disc. Crap.
Hope sleep helps–or else I pull out the Flexeril tomorrow (it makes me dopey, so I can’t take it tonoc–must be alert for nurse work).
Oh, and Library Crazy Person (the one who watches the clock whenever I show up), did it again today. I was going to say something, but then another coworker came up behind us and said, “By the way, Eleanor said she’d be 20 minutes late. I forgot to tell everyone!”. I laughed at the expression on CP’s face. Made my morning (perhaps I need to work on nice-ness…)
Wow, lots and lots of posts. Glad the interview was OK, swampy. Hope tomorrow’s goes even better. Maybe the job will be more interesting.
And Drae, how was yours?
Yay for your freedom from N.C, LiLi!
rigs, you just copied something large (did you copy and paste something?) and it was asking you if you wanted it to hold onto it so that you could paste it somewhere else.
Glad that Library Crazy Person got her comeuppance for the moment, rigs. And sorry about the gossipy lady. Definitely a person worth ignoring.
QD, sweetie: Bobbio and Puggy are right about the undergarment sitch. Very important to note.
The girls arm-in-arm thing is a really interesting cultural thing. I feel like I’m changing hats when I go from country to country. Mexico: yes, absolutely. U.S.: not usually. Germany: Hardly ever.
Pretty pics, Mama Tigs. We had an awful ice storm here Christmas 2004. Very pretty, but a major problem for lots of people. I had lots of friends who were without electricity for a week. I was lucky and just had to live without internet for about 12 hours. Highly inconvenient, of course, but I had heat and electricity. And, yes, traveling in a car was NOT fun.
Sounds like a bad case of academic politics, Spats. You’ll probably want to pay attention to all of this to avoid getting stuck in the middle of it later on.
I wish I’d taken more stats, cuz I could really use a better understanding these days. I’ve picked up bits and pieces from friends and colleagues, but it would have been nice to have more that one really bad course when I was a junior in college about 100 years ago.
Mork and gotti, y’all are geeks. 
I don’t have a machine with XP (I assume I’ll get stuck with Vista now) yet; my old PC has ME, which mostly makes it easier to deal with USB stuff. My laptop is an iBook (which I’m very attached to), but I’ll eventually replace the PC with another laptop because I have a need to run a few programs that are only available in Windows versions. Also, the iBook is the one that travels and the PC is the one with info that I don’t really want to drag around the world with me. But I’m trying to delay replacing the PC. It’s really old - bought it in 1998 - but it mostly runs really well and I don’t use it enough to replace it until I absolutely have to. (I have an external hard drive attached to it and back up all my documents to it, so it won’t be a tragedy if it kicks…).
Well, I’ve been starting post for something like 3 hours. Maybe I should just hit submit.
GT
Whenever you cut (or copy) text (as in MS Word) or images (as in Photoshop) that data is stored in an area called the clipboard, a temporary holding area that you can then use later when you to to paste that data wherever it is you wanted it.
Ordinarily, whatever you put in the clipboard stays there until it is overwritten by some other bit you’ve cut/copied. Some programs, such as MS Word, create multiple clipboards and you can view the contents of these clipboards from within Word. Because clipboard data can take up a lot of room if you have large images or whatnot stored there, Word can purge its clipboards on exit. It gives you the option, however, to forgo that purge if for whatever reason you want that data to be available to other programs later on. If you answer no, the clipboards will be cleared, freeing up memory.
Clear as mud?
I used to be paranoid about that, especially when I got my first PC. The store didn’t give me a copy of Windows 98 (yeah, it was one of those stores, turns out) so if I screwed anything up I was toast. Over the years though I’ve gotten exceptionally familiar with Windows and PCs in general – heck, I got CompTIA A+ certified so I could pursue a career in PC repair and such if I wanted. (I no longer do. Not that I don’t like fixing computers. Just that some of the customers need a good “fixing” themselves. If you think retail work introduces you to some real characters, try working as a technician where you get to interact with the customers directly. Lemme tellya, it makes you consider lobbying to legalize post-partum abortion.)
Also, I don’t like relying on other people to fix things. I much prefer to be able to do it myself. I mean, I’m always available when a problem arises, I’m not to shabby at what I do, and best of all, I’m cheap.
My mother is a copycat.
I’m getting my knee replaced in ten days, right? So today she goes to the doctor about her sore knees, and what happens? He schedules her for a knee replacement a month after mine!
Sheesh. You know I’m falling apart when my 86-year-old mother is catching up with me!