My computer has been mostly dead all day, and a little headshake won’t<\/i> make it happy.<\/p>\n
Four years ago, a lightning strike while I was at work fried the motherboard’s comm bus. The onboard modem was a total loss, and I’m pretty sure the network port was a goner, too. I installed a PCI modem which worked.<\/p>\n
Mostly.<\/p>\n
There were difficulties in configuring it, like the computer’s decision to insist that the PCI modem needed to go on COM1, whereupon it would vanish completely. Eventually, I was able to clear the hardware conflicts, and force the computer to put the modem on COM3. And even then it was touchy as hell<\/i>.<\/p>\n
(And I went through the entire process a year later when I had to nuke my hard drive and reinstall everything from scratch, after my sister put a virus on my computer.)<\/p>\n
Over the past month or so, the modem has grown increasingly finnicky.<\/p>\n
Last night, the modem was dead. The computer tried<\/i>. The diagnostics said it was there and working perfectly. I checked the phone lines. I tried a different phone line. I tried a different cable. For whatever reason, the modem didn’t work.<\/p>\n
I opened the computer up and tried a different PCI slot. This time, the computer didn’t even see<\/i> it.<\/p>\n
Iocane powder, I’d bet my life on it!<\/p>\n
I had a spare modem. (After an accident involving Beamish Stout and my Microsoft Natural Keyboard, I’ve learned to keep spares of certain parts handy.) I installed that and gave it a try.<\/p>\n
Still nothing.<\/p>\n
I’ve known for four years that the computer was living, like the Challengers of the Unknown, on borrowed time. Time’s up.<\/p>\n
The computer is still functional. It’s just blind to the world. And I suppose that this weekend I’ll look into replacing it.<\/p>\n
I may turn the computer into a Linux machine. (I have a Linux Mint live-CD handy. There are good reasons to keep Linux live-CDs handy, especially if you ever need to circumvent Windows’ file permissions.) I’ll probably pull out my current hard drive and turn it into a slave drive on the new machine (it’s the easiest way to move my documents), then put a new hard drive into the current machine.<\/p>\n
Suffice it to say, I am not<\/i> going to have fun storming the castle.<\/p>\n
And what’s with all the Princess Bride<\/i> references?<\/p>\n
I reread “Spindle” when Re:Collections<\/i> arrived<\/a>, and the reference to the Doctor’s meeting with Vizzini cracks me up every time. (For reference, it’s on midway down on page 239 of The Quality of Leadership<\/i> and at the top of page 412 in Re:Collections<\/i>.)<\/p>\n Of course, that raises the question. Which Doctor, exactly, met Vizzini?<\/p>\n I have no idea. But if I had<\/i> to take a guess, I would humbly suggest that the Dread Pirate Wesley is, in actually, a pre-Hartnell Doctor.<\/p>\n Or is that inconceivable? \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My computer has been mostly dead all day, and a little headshake won’t make it happy. Four years ago, a lightning strike while I was at work fried the motherboard’s comm bus. The onboard modem was a total loss, and I’m pretty sure the network port was a goner, too. I installed a PCI modemContinue reading “On Communications Woes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[4093],"class_list":["post-2391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-life","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}