I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

I've had an... uhh... interesting Christmas.

First of all, what do the "Godfather of Soul" James Brown and my computer's harddrive have in common?

As of Monday, they're both dead.

I'm not 100% sure about my harddrive, but Windows starts up normally for a few seconds, but then I get the mega-blue error screen of death saying "INNACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE" and it won't even let me boot into "Safe Mode" to see what the problem is. My father will have a look at it, but I don't think there's anything that can be done, not if it's a hardware problem.

Fortunately for me, I have another computer, which is the one I was using when I was living in the apartment part-time and attending that computer animation school. However, due to my not being nearly as security aware in 2002 as I am now, I got a trojan disguised as an IRC program from Kazaa which automatically came on everytime I logged in that I was never able to get rid of using anti-virus programmes, Spybot, or Hijack This. Eventually, I reinstalled Windows 2000 over the existing Windows 2000, and that disabled the trojan but the reinstallation screwed up a lot of the drivers, so the picture is in basic 800 by 600 16-colour VGA mode pretty much identical to safe mode and my CD-Rom burer became read-only for some reason. It'll probably be my main computer, but I'll probably have to re-format the hard drive and start over from scratch before it's ready to access the Internet. (I'm typing this on my mother's computer.)

Bottom line, even though I haven't exactly been a daily blogger lately, blogging will still be light this week until I can get up and running on the other computer.

I'd tell you about other things I've done over the past few days, but I can't get the pictures off my Kodak Easyshare camera without messing around with the wires at the back of this computer. (It has a docking wire for a camera, but it's for the Ricoh Caplio, which uses a plug that is annoyingly similar looking but about a millimetre too wide for the Kodak Easyshare camera.)

In the meantime, if you celebrate it in either a religious or a secular capacity, I hope you and yours had a wonderful Christmas experience (despite the lack of snow in North America east of Denver... by the way, New World Order conspiracy theorists, if there really is a huge underground United Nations-run concentration camp for patriotic Americans located under the vaguely swastika-like runways of Denver International Airport, you'd think they'd have opened up at least a few of the dormitories for all of those stranded passengers), and, if not, at least you get time off and triple pay.

Speaking of people who had to work on Christmas (with due compensation, of course), my father did, so we're having the bulk of our celebration on Thursday, when my brother Nick and his girlfriend can also join us).

posted by Steve Brandon @ 3:21 AM