tech cursed
In the last 24 hours, I've passed the point where I can be more than sickly amused at the events around me.
I've decided to bore people and share my pain.
After a long weekend of caffeine and very special computer time, I leaned back at 11:00 pm Monday night and breathed a sigh that I completed the set of documents that I had to have ready by 8am Tuesday morning. Unfortunately, before I hit send from 4 very long days of work I looked up to see that Sasha (aka Dumb as dirt) was holding her eye half closed. (She has stitches on her eye after a $2200 surgery last week and a Cone of silence around her neck). I tried to do the requisite check to see if an Emergency Vet visit was in my near future only to have her pull away, knocking my laptop off the coffee table.
I didn't panic (its happened before) until after I had evaluated her eye and found out that "Yes, I'm going to the vet" (Boo had a similar issue which ultimately cost me around 10k ... so better to handle it ASAP). Then I gaze at my laptop and spy a pattern that would only be interesting if my mind was in an otherwise altered state. Joy. Cracked monitor. I reboot it and hear it spin up, breathing a sigh of relief and prepare to hook it to a tv. Unfortunately, in my cleaning binge I put my connector away in a black hole and could not retrieve it. And Macs cant use anything standard which would have been laying around in my giant snakes nest cable drawer.
To make things more special, the PC I've kept store in my house for emergencies (like this) went to a new home with a friend's son a few weeks ago because I hadn't turned it on in forever (obviously a bad call).
Went to the emergency vet - happily the cost for the visit was low and I got the very cute but brisk vet who looked at Sasha on her last visit 3 weeks ago. Both the receptionist and this vet now recognize both me and Sasha (and I've only had her 6 months). Stopped on the way home (1:50am) at a friend who is a night owl and plugged my computer to see if the disk had combusted or anything. Nope. All good. Breathe sigh of relief and borrow "his" cable.
I go home, and prepare to transfer data (my last backup was several weeks ago) before going to sleep (using my iPhone to cancel my 8am meeting which required computer access and move my 7am to 8am to give me some breathing room for sleep). The connector on the cable is too long and won't fit into the access point on my TV. Shit. I find an S-Video connector for Mac ... too fuzzy to actually work but good enough to transfer files on my nice little drive (much better than the bigger ones I have) while I sleep. I make an appointment at the Genius bar at the apple store to get a price on fixing it (for some reason, I can't seem to manage my password while using the web browser on my phone so after 5 attempts typing the same word I register as a guest). I go to sleep just past 4am.
Morning comes and I get up, sit on calls, send email on my phone to the person waiting for my documents claiming tech failure, drive to the Apple store, buy a new computer. (Yea !!! I decided I wanted this one when it was announced recently. Boo!!! I had decided I didn't have the money and was waiting for christmas). My guesstimate was $800 to fix the monitor and I was high ... but only by $24. I looked at their flat panels so that I could work while setting up my new system ... way to expensive. I travel to fry's (one of my nightmares), spent 15 minutes trying to find someone who could translate "I want the cheapest flat panel you have" and actually give me that and not try and sell me a $600 one ($108 :-)).
Side comment - oh man are the new keyboards nice (they type better than any keyboard I've tried).
I get home, set up the monitor, spare mouse and keyboard (hidden in my closet). Keyboard is dead, so I replace batteries. Keyboard still fails, its bluetooth and will not pair (is the computer or the keyboard broker ?? At this point I don't care). I send out my document (3 hours late) using my laptop keyboard and find I have an email from a friend who is trying to reach me on IM.
He just got a weird random message from me (probably 2 weeks old) and wanted a translation and I have no clue what it was about - more tech curse. As a positive - he asked me why I hadn't contacted someone he works with about a job. I thought the ball was in Geoff's (possible hiring manager) court, but it seems that he sent me mail late last week to meet him for lunch yesterday but it never arrived (more tech curse). I Ping'ed him and met him 20 minutes later.
Ok - this is the good part here. Its with a huge Chinese telco provider which would be strange, but the job (that I thought would be disjoint and boring) could be fun. Its working in the technology group that is defining a new direction for stuff that will provide highly scalable cloud-ish stuff (mostly hardware as a service, IP as a service and some software components) with a very targeted market. The group does the architecture and some prototyping but the development is done overseas. They are well funded and he actually got some of the ideas I've been trying to sell inside of Sun. At Sun I've gotten two "your ideas are interesting" and lots of "ah, we want a different answer please play again". Yeah, I know all of you tech folks are now yawning, but I've always worked on dull software (middleware) so I actually think that the concept of architecting a large scale massively scalable network of servers and architecture sounds fun. I'm just a server girl.
Friday follow-up interview should be interesting but I have to send him an updated resume today once I find it.
So, at this point, my bad luck should have run out right ??? No. A friend (yes, Steve for those who know my personal drama and no, I still haven't decided where its going) was supposed to stop by after a meeting and improve my mood. When he got out he let me know and I texted him back a "yes, I'm here, come by", and 2 hours of silence later I texted him again to find out the ETA. My initial text had never arrived (I've had it happen with him before, he uses some cheap random cell-phone provider) and after killing over an hour waiting to hear from me, he had given up and was now home and helping his boys on homework. Damn.
I decide to at least check up on work email on my cobbled together system (while I continue to work on my new one), sky is falling but as soon as I find that out, work email craps out. Shit. Wait an hour, still not up.
I got slightly drunk (what else do you do) with a friend. When he arrives, I give him my whole drama, bitch that I still can't find the monitor cable, open the drawer and its sitting exactly where it was supposed to be in plain sight (maybe it took a vacation with the socks and just returned). I decide to go back up to updating my machine (downloading software seems safe on alcohol) and now my network is down (thank you comcast).
I decided to review my mail via phone - and found three copies of every message. My head began to spin.
I gave up and went to sleep.
So in one day:
At least Sasha appears to be fairly cheap (fingers crossed ... vet appt @ 2).
Maybe today will be better.
I've decided to bore people and share my pain.
After a long weekend of caffeine and very special computer time, I leaned back at 11:00 pm Monday night and breathed a sigh that I completed the set of documents that I had to have ready by 8am Tuesday morning. Unfortunately, before I hit send from 4 very long days of work I looked up to see that Sasha (aka Dumb as dirt) was holding her eye half closed. (She has stitches on her eye after a $2200 surgery last week and a Cone of silence around her neck). I tried to do the requisite check to see if an Emergency Vet visit was in my near future only to have her pull away, knocking my laptop off the coffee table.
I didn't panic (its happened before) until after I had evaluated her eye and found out that "Yes, I'm going to the vet" (Boo had a similar issue which ultimately cost me around 10k ... so better to handle it ASAP). Then I gaze at my laptop and spy a pattern that would only be interesting if my mind was in an otherwise altered state. Joy. Cracked monitor. I reboot it and hear it spin up, breathing a sigh of relief and prepare to hook it to a tv. Unfortunately, in my cleaning binge I put my connector away in a black hole and could not retrieve it. And Macs cant use anything standard which would have been laying around in my giant snakes nest cable drawer.
To make things more special, the PC I've kept store in my house for emergencies (like this) went to a new home with a friend's son a few weeks ago because I hadn't turned it on in forever (obviously a bad call).
Went to the emergency vet - happily the cost for the visit was low and I got the very cute but brisk vet who looked at Sasha on her last visit 3 weeks ago. Both the receptionist and this vet now recognize both me and Sasha (and I've only had her 6 months). Stopped on the way home (1:50am) at a friend who is a night owl and plugged my computer to see if the disk had combusted or anything. Nope. All good. Breathe sigh of relief and borrow "his" cable.
I go home, and prepare to transfer data (my last backup was several weeks ago) before going to sleep (using my iPhone to cancel my 8am meeting which required computer access and move my 7am to 8am to give me some breathing room for sleep). The connector on the cable is too long and won't fit into the access point on my TV. Shit. I find an S-Video connector for Mac ... too fuzzy to actually work but good enough to transfer files on my nice little drive (much better than the bigger ones I have) while I sleep. I make an appointment at the Genius bar at the apple store to get a price on fixing it (for some reason, I can't seem to manage my password while using the web browser on my phone so after 5 attempts typing the same word I register as a guest). I go to sleep just past 4am.
Morning comes and I get up, sit on calls, send email on my phone to the person waiting for my documents claiming tech failure, drive to the Apple store, buy a new computer. (Yea !!! I decided I wanted this one when it was announced recently. Boo!!! I had decided I didn't have the money and was waiting for christmas). My guesstimate was $800 to fix the monitor and I was high ... but only by $24. I looked at their flat panels so that I could work while setting up my new system ... way to expensive. I travel to fry's (one of my nightmares), spent 15 minutes trying to find someone who could translate "I want the cheapest flat panel you have" and actually give me that and not try and sell me a $600 one ($108 :-)).
Side comment - oh man are the new keyboards nice (they type better than any keyboard I've tried).
I get home, set up the monitor, spare mouse and keyboard (hidden in my closet). Keyboard is dead, so I replace batteries. Keyboard still fails, its bluetooth and will not pair (is the computer or the keyboard broker ?? At this point I don't care). I send out my document (3 hours late) using my laptop keyboard and find I have an email from a friend who is trying to reach me on IM.
He just got a weird random message from me (probably 2 weeks old) and wanted a translation and I have no clue what it was about - more tech curse. As a positive - he asked me why I hadn't contacted someone he works with about a job. I thought the ball was in Geoff's (possible hiring manager) court, but it seems that he sent me mail late last week to meet him for lunch yesterday but it never arrived (more tech curse). I Ping'ed him and met him 20 minutes later.
Ok - this is the good part here. Its with a huge Chinese telco provider which would be strange, but the job (that I thought would be disjoint and boring) could be fun. Its working in the technology group that is defining a new direction for stuff that will provide highly scalable cloud-ish stuff (mostly hardware as a service, IP as a service and some software components) with a very targeted market. The group does the architecture and some prototyping but the development is done overseas. They are well funded and he actually got some of the ideas I've been trying to sell inside of Sun. At Sun I've gotten two "your ideas are interesting" and lots of "ah, we want a different answer please play again". Yeah, I know all of you tech folks are now yawning, but I've always worked on dull software (middleware) so I actually think that the concept of architecting a large scale massively scalable network of servers and architecture sounds fun. I'm just a server girl.
Friday follow-up interview should be interesting but I have to send him an updated resume today once I find it.
So, at this point, my bad luck should have run out right ??? No. A friend (yes, Steve for those who know my personal drama and no, I still haven't decided where its going) was supposed to stop by after a meeting and improve my mood. When he got out he let me know and I texted him back a "yes, I'm here, come by", and 2 hours of silence later I texted him again to find out the ETA. My initial text had never arrived (I've had it happen with him before, he uses some cheap random cell-phone provider) and after killing over an hour waiting to hear from me, he had given up and was now home and helping his boys on homework. Damn.
I decide to at least check up on work email on my cobbled together system (while I continue to work on my new one), sky is falling but as soon as I find that out, work email craps out. Shit. Wait an hour, still not up.
I got slightly drunk (what else do you do) with a friend. When he arrives, I give him my whole drama, bitch that I still can't find the monitor cable, open the drawer and its sitting exactly where it was supposed to be in plain sight (maybe it took a vacation with the socks and just returned). I decide to go back up to updating my machine (downloading software seems safe on alcohol) and now my network is down (thank you comcast).
I decided to review my mail via phone - and found three copies of every message. My head began to spin.
I gave up and went to sleep.
So in one day:
- Busted laptop thanks to dog error and no fallback computer available (lots of $ spent) just as I was going to send out critical work
- Keyboard not pairing
- Missing Cables
- Cables which can not be used because of the configuration of the monitor/tv
- Old IM messages showing up
- Email messages disappearing
- Text messages going missing
- Work email outages
- Home network outages
- Mail showing up in triplicate.
At least Sasha appears to be fairly cheap (fingers crossed ... vet appt @ 2).
Maybe today will be better.