azurelunatic

The current plan involves taking Tigereye out of her body and transplanting her into the empty shell of another Latitude CPt, one with a CD drive bay lock, one with all its mouse buttons, and (at least in theory) a working keyboard.

V is so very excited. It's an actually-working laptop computer, and it has her two favorite anti-malware programs installed on it.

We had one of those interesting "Not all of these people know each other, do they?" moments this evening when picking up the empty shell from figment0. The invasion force consisted of V, easalle, and me. figment0 and (his invisible-to-strangers black cat) Doris did not have any company at that time. As figment0 proudly displayed his wife's collection of sharp stabby things, my phone rang. It was trystan_laryssa, wanting to know if I could ask easalle if she had seen her bag, which she hasn't been able to find since the ill-fated Potter excursion. Two representatives of each of the major offline social groups I interact with, and with me as the link. The timing wouldn't have been half so funny without the presence of both figment0 and easalle.

Misty's sword Scalebane is significantly taller than easalle. A request for photos has been submitted to the committee. (No, there is neither a Bruno nor a Boots involved with this endeavor.)

Casual reference to Darkside still makes me light up and clutch at my pendant. Even when I'm the one who mentions him.

I am preparing my old laptop for V's use on the road. We started discussing the technical issues involved in getting it set up. V is so very non-technical, I have to fish around for appropriately quirky mnemonics to help her remember crucial issues.

"Will I be able to use this computer on the internet connection at the cat house?" (V is cat-sitting for some friends.)
"What kind of internet connection is it?" (trying to figure out if there are any arcane username/password concoctions that we won't know...)
"I ... think it's DSL?"
(Trying to figure if it's something arcane that requires juggling and more knowledge of secret stuff I don't know) "Um. What cords are plugged into it?"
"Two phone cords."
"Two phone cords? ... Is one of the phone cords wider than the other?"
"They look the same width. ... One's thin, your normal phone cord, the other one's fat and round."
"Could you unplug the fat round one and look at how many little dents it has in the plug end?"
"Like the wires? I see ... a white one, an orange one, a white one, a blue one, a white one, a green one, and a white one. That's seven."
"That's ... actually not a phone cord."
"The plug does look wider than a normal phone cord, yeah."
"It's a special kind of cord called a 'cat-5' cable. ... Normal phone cords can only take one cat chewing on them. A cat-5 cable is big enough, it could take five cats chewing on it at once."
(after the snickering died down) "Sort of like a three dog night. Can't I just call it a phone cord?"
"No. That will confuse other geeks very badly."
"So I have to call it a five cat cord."
"Close enough."

The laptop in question has two card slots, stacked one on top of the other so that unless the cards do not have lumpy things sticking out of the top of them, only one card at a time can be actually used. I was trying and failing to explain this, then I remembered that V is a sex educator.
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AKICIF.

I wonder if the combination of the character for "mouth" on top of the character for "woman" has a pre-existing meaning. I know "mouth" on "man" is "elder brother".

I wonder what the characters for "internet" are. "Mouth-woman on the internet" is a relatively apt description of me, eh?

Laptop brain transplant failed. The clone was already dead.

What is so unique about a kid going missing and local authorities are incompetent? oh, a us kid overseas. Right. STFU, CNN!

"Not Exactly Turtles All the Way Down" -- cadhla, Red Dwarf/Discworld crossover, gen

Google Moon Be sure to zoom in for full detailed appreciation!


Schadenpersion: That feeling of joy you get from watching someone else start a happy, new, and utterly doomed relationship.

I need the drivers for Windows 2000 for this thing.

I woke up early to transplant Tigereye's hard drive into the spare identical laptop case from figment0. (I'm not yet secure enough in my geek to transplant a hard drive into a different laptop case when I don't know what drivers it needs or anything.) There was much cussing as I discovered that the screw holding the hard drive in was impossible to unscrew. I unscrewed a lot of other things, but that didn't work to pry the hard drive free. (There was no actual prying per se, just conceptual.)

Finally, by dint of the sort of focus that martial artists and practitioners of magic need to have, I managed to ease the screw loose, bit by bit. Turned out that some asshat had secured it with a dab of some form of screw glue. I cussed up a storm and put the hard drive in the clone body.

I did not plug the thing into wall current, thinking (probably wisely) that I should try it just on battery power lest something be wrong. (In retrospect, I should have tried it first with battery without HD, then with.) There was a massive failure to boot. I growled, glowered, and began the (much easier) process of putting everything back where I found it. V called just as I was finishing up screwing, and I told her the bad news.

She came over to pick the thing up and to get a few more things done while I was still around. It was finally time to go. I unplugged my spare green cat-5 cable from her new NIC, and something about the end of it caught my eye. "Hey, this thing has holes in it!" I discovered.

I looked closer. Yep, dozens of tiny little puncture marks. The sort not made by any machine. I started laughing and showed it to V.

"Looks like you've got about four cats left on that thing," she told me.

If eris_raven and I were still living together, that impertinent little fluff would get a severe glaring-at, and perhaps a bath. (shammash categorically does not chew cords or step on keyboards, because of bellow-induced trauma when he tried this as a kitten. Miss Raven was never so trained.)

One 2000 laptop, used, in fair condition, with power cord, two batteries, CD drive (no floppy), external keyboard (necessary), wired USB optical mouse (not necessary), brand-new replacement NIC, brand-new USB wireless adapter, a couple lengths of cat-5 patch cable.
A couple hours labor, intermittently sprinkled with phrases such as "bloody buggering fuckweasel".
$10 change in "blood money" (from plasma donation).

The price of a pair of tires (new).
One external CD drive (read-only).
An ancient laptop of many secrets and not much hard drive space.
$60 in 20s, from yard sale proceeds.
4 pints Ben & Jerry's (1 Cherry Garcia, 3 New York Super Fudge Chunk).


This is the way the Good Ol' Boys Network side of the economy works (where "boys" is gender-neutral).