Suck is....

!


*Sends a Priest of Asis to the Purple Dragon! *

Suck is...

Spending money on parts and investing hours and hours on troubleshooting and repairs only to have your motherboard die a week after you get the system running ok.

I'm posting from my phone ATM. Probly gonna be offline for 1-2 weeks while I procure parts and perform setup, configuration, and imaging.

Money was tight to begin with...

This blows.

Sorry. If anyone knows whether it would be cheaper to invest in a new system, it would be you. Hope you get to return soon.

Man that just blows, hope ya get it all figured out and can get back to us sooner then later

Oye, that really does suck. Sorry to hear that, Dave.

Oh no. Veleron's Epic Nuclear Strike hit the Archmage below the belt and send him down for the counting!

Hope you get it all sorted out, dave!

Know that we miss you and wish you a speedy recovery from this catastrophe!

RJ

Suck is....

Working for nearly a year-ish real time on an awesome update to your "player clan-house", meticulously placing everything, writing up descriptions, agonising over all the small details until each persons section is perfect....

To find out when adding some last details and finally being "happy" with the result... that a computer crash not just removes today's changes... but corrupts the whole damn module!!.... It just refuses to open and crashes the toolset!!........

I'm looking into the problem to see if I can find a solution, and other modules are opening fine, just not the one I was working on with my new player house in it..... At this point in time, I just feel so so so gutted... ....

Have you looked for the backup? The toolset usually makes a backup, Player_Building_Module.BackupMod .

Yeah I tried that already.. the problem was my PC did a blue-screen of death crash mid saving the module.... It's not even throwing up any error reports... try to load and toolset crashes... 100%.... really confused on this one, I can normally sort problems like this...

Unfortunately, it's times like this that make one think about multiple backups. I'm sort of a backup freak, so I have several copies of my module, and at least an A and a B could preserve one untouched previous version module if another becomes corrupted and lost.

I do hope you can recover your module, though I can't really think of any way atm.

I've asked my favorite tech's tech, EC, to see if he can advise you.

Let's start with the simple stuff, and work our way from there. Recovering from a blue screen can be a pain in the butt (especially when something gets corrupted). However, it's rare that data is truly gone/unreadable. So, with that in mind, let's be positive, and see what we can do!

First step, for me, whenever recovering a computer from such an issue, is to boot up in safe mode (with command prompt), and run 'chkdsk'. Check Disk will look, and repair (which it does more often than not), any damage/corrupted files it comes across.

Try this first, if you haven't already, and see what, if anything, it does. I'll do some remembering on data retrieval, and see what the next step will be, should that not work.

Well.. it seems now I have a partial file to work from... it's one that I had previously .rar'ed and attached to an email... was about to send to when he announced the planned changes to the craft system... so I held off a bit.... ...

Thankye RJ for reminding me to check "the backups of the backups"

So it's a little outdated and I'd made a fair few changes since then but it's a close workable copy... onwards with the tweeking, should be ready to go in another couple of months

I'd suggest that you still try the chkdsk procedure as EC recommended. As he said, it's possible that it could repair your module file.

Even if you've already overwritten the file, it would still be good to run chkdsk to straighten out other possible corruptions that the incident may have inserted into your data everywhere.

No more job. Man ... I don't really feel like writing about it just now ... but, yeah, it sucks.

Really sorry; hopefully things for everyone will improve soon.

I can feel your pain on that front Eric, hope it turns around here before to long

Woah... bad times my friend....

Although... more time for NWN !! Every dark cloud has a silver lining in it somewhere

"Always look on the bright side of life," eh?

Thanks for the encouragement, y'all ... you guys are the wind beneath my wings! (Just, don't tell my wife I said that ... )

Bummer, Eric. I can recall that feeling of suddenly being out of a job when you don't want to.



Suck is...

...trying for more than a year to buy a house (need more inside space for the kids)...
...constantly getting beaten out by cash offers (I hate you, investors)....
...waiting on an offer on a short sale, then it goes into foreclosure...
...watching the market dry up as banks hold back thousands of foreclosed houses so prices go up...
...finding out months after the offer was in that you're going to get that foreclosed house...
...now stuck moving in the middle of summer in this damn oven called Arizona...

I hate this place.

Dude, sorry to hear that! Is everything finalized, or is there more paperworks to be done? I didn't know that the Dragons were looking to up and relocate ... I wish y'all the bestest of luck with that - I never did care much for moving, myself. Last big time we moved, folks I knew were like "we can have a whole crew to help you move in! No problem!" My friend brought his 4-year-old daughter, and my dad hired some drunk guy off the street (no lie). Fun times, fun times! (And of course, after that, the drunk dude regularly stopped at our house to try and get money from us - thanks, dad, the gift that keeps on giving!)

Yeah, losing the job sucks. A couple of weeks before that, the boss/owner was all like "Yeah, man, I don't know where you wanna be in 10 years, but this is something that you can make a career out of, and you can do it anywhere!"

Yeah, except here, apparently. ;(

Sorry to hear bout the job, Eric.

Good luck with the move, .

I'm not quite back online yet. Got not one but two bad motherboards as well as at least one bad ram stick, so the PC build and setup is going from 2 weeks to a month long ordeal... Ups delivering my crap to the wrong address didn't help.

Hopefully in a few days I will be mostly sorted.

Thanks for the thoughts, dave, and I hope that you get online soon! It's been awhile since I've seen one of those Orbital Strikes!

Suck is...

A haboob (the name for a dust storm). Recorded as it rolled across my house a half hour ago.

Nice vid; glad I wasn't there....

Aye, that looks like grit fun! We don't get such things here, only the occasional derecho (it's almost as much fun to say as haboob)!

Thanks for the vid!

Wowwie!

I hope that you at least haven't been affected by the floods and the wildfires, .

Suck is...

The start of my weekend. Got woken up early by the sister-in-law ringing the doorbell. Wife was hit by a drunk driver on the way to work at 3:45 am. She'll be fine (no major injuries), just a short hospital stay for pain meds and observation). Car is totaled though. Looks like I'll be busy with something other than NWN for a few days.

Im glad Mrs. Dragon is OK. Best wishes for speedy recovery, and good luck with vehicle situation.

Hope Mrs Dragon is feeling well soon. And personally, hope the drunk gets to remain walking for a long, long time.

As far as I know, the drunk and his buddy were arrested trying to flee the scene. I saw the car...had to get a few things out of it at the impound lot. What a mess. Looks like the airbags deployed properly though. Seatbelts are a great invention ...I recommend everyone wear them...it definitely helped the wife.

Yep; love seatbelts myself; secret is to make them fit so comfortably as you strap in to them, thus imagining you are traveling in a Sci-Fi ship of some fave design. I mean, who in Sci-Fi does not want to strap themselves in well?

Glad she is on the mend, and hope these loons have many days of forced sobriety ahead of them.

That sucks, glad to hear your Mrs. will be ok though, in the end that's what really matters. Wishing her a speedy recovery.

Yeah, seriously! Very glad that Mrs. is ok, hopefully will be out and about soon ...

We're home as of last night, but she's hurtin', so I've been offline for most of the past couple of days, and likely will be for more. Now it's time to start dealing with police, lawyers, insurance companies, and others, all the while trying to manage pain and children.

Good luck , and a fast recovery to the Mrs Dragon.

The Amethyst Dragon wrote:We're home as of last night, but she's hurtin', so I've been offline for most of the past couple of days, and likely will be for more. Now it's time to start dealing with police, lawyers, insurance companies, and others, all the while trying to manage pain and children.

This is where the dry AZ heat might be a bonus; seems to beat the humid or snowy climates for relieving muscular aches and pains. In any event, hope this time is short, as well as the resultant litigation.

Aye, what Elhanan said!

In the middle of two simultaneous urgent data rescue/os rebuilds, windows updates get pushed to my main work machine... Which reboots and proceeds to have errors and crashes galore... Including my email client....

I don't have time for this rubbish...

Two weeks of repeated DSL outages of 15+ hrs/day with little hope of relief in sight. And have not experienced so much miscommunication since I was married....

Not sure if cable Internet is an option or affordable, but in my experience it soundly trumps both the performance and reliability of DSL.

daveyeisley wrote:Not sure if cable Internet is an option or affordable, but in my experience it soundly trumps both the performance and reliability of DSL.

Thanks for the tip, as I had heard the reverse!

However, local cable is reported by some friends to be rather poor, and I must have a telephone anyway for emergencies. Thus I am a bit stuck waiting for the Techs to get it right, though an in house visit costs extra.

On a brighter note, the majority of those I have spoken with in Customer Service have been capable, and some of these have shown excellent listening skills, kindness, and patience. Having had been in the Hospitality industry for the past 25+ yrs has helped me see a little clearer the power of such skill sets. As I have been with this ISP for 9+ yrs, it is my hope that things will be resolved soon.

Being forced to cut back on computer time for a week.

My 5 year old laptop, which I use for everything NWN, is in need of a new cooling fan. The original has now died, and I await the arrival of a replacement I just ordered. Then, of course, it'll be my first adventure in really opening up the computer and unhooking/rehooking everything up. Here's hoping I don't kill my computer in the process when I do it.

At least you are able to try. I would have to buy a replacement, new NWN1 software, and reinstall it all again. Good luck!

And you think we have it bad. My Mom takes care of another woman here in town, and after a few surgeries for various ailments, the recent loss of her husband, and having her family and lawyer take as much as they can, she was struck by a car while shopping and may now have a broken rib. And she was almost all smiles when I met her at Thaksgiving... except when I mentioned lawyers.

The Amethyst Dragon wrote:it'll be my first adventure in really opening up the computer and unhooking/rehooking everything up. Here's hoping I don't kill my computer in the process when I do it.

In comparison to desktop repair which is very straightforward, laptop repair is *very prone to error*.

Get a service manual, *invest in the right tools*, label everything as you go, if something doesn't feel right as you try to detach it - you are doing it incorrectly (stop and re-assess). Most of all take your time and schedule multiple sessions to avoid getting impatient and making an error.

Unlike a desktop where a single error can be pretty easily corrected (by say replacing a single nerfed part) errors while working on laptops can easily cost you the whole laptop (becomes more expensive to fix than replace).

My record to date:
desktop style repair (was a technician in the "good old days") 100% performed 100's of times
laptop/netbook repair 0% attempted a dozen or so times (I no longer even try...)

Good Luck!

More of a minor inconvenience, but am still having some connection issues that are related more to the phone lines than my DSL problems of last month. Hence, this is the source of many of the disconnects I have experienced recently; hope to be repaired tomorrow.

laptop fan update...

Replacement fan was supposed to arrive Friday. It showed up Tuesday afternoon.

Went to open up the laptop. Three tiny screws (inside the battery space) refused to come out. They'd been overtightened in the factory, evidently. Had to get them out to open up the laptop, so I resorted to putting a tiny screwdriver into my full sized electric drill (in place of a bit) and forced the issue. Stripped out the screw heads a bit, but finally got them to budge. Took them out. The stupid things were only about 1.5 mm long.

Unhooked keyboard, then speakers, display, and touchpad. Pried up the main part of the case. De-dusted inside with compressed air can thingy. Finally go to the fan and was about to take out screws to remove it. Decided to hit it (again) with compressed air...which I'd done many times from below and the side vent. It still didn't move. Noticed a tiny bit of fuzzy dust sticking out one side.

Ended up prying out three dense dust bunnies that I would not have found without 1/2 deconstructing the laptop. Decided to put battery back in, just to make sure the fan was really dead.

Well, wouldn't you know, I'm now the proud owner of a back-up laptop cooling fan, which I'll be hanging onto in case the 5+ year old one really does die.



On the bright side, I got curious about laptop RAM (since I didn't even know how the sticks went into the sockets) and found out RAM has gotten much cheaper over the last four years. $45 (thanks, Amazon), and by Friday night this week I should be upgrading the laptop from 1 GB RAM to 3.5 GB.

Of course, now today and for a while I'm going to have less time for computer stuff. The wife had orthoscopic surgery on her wrist this morning, so I'm back to parent+wifehelper duty. At least it wasn't a car accident this time.

OK; time to vent....

I get the fact that someone has to pay the bills somewhere, and that ads are a neccessary evil of the Internet. I even get the idea that in order to get free info that it isn't really free. And as much as they annoy me personally, ads will always strive to stay one jump ahead of the Ad Blockers that I try to install.

But when we as a Nation, or perhaps even as a world come together in a solemn moment of reflection - such as gazing on the pictures of those cruelly slain by a callous evil - in order to pay our personal respects to those lost in a school beyond our own borders, and find that those personal, individual pics and vids are interrupted by the seemingly brazen message, "This eulogy is brought to you by ....", then it may be time to say, "Not if I have anything to say about it!"

Those that in their ignorance chose to place such ads will not directly get a dollar of my business, see a moment of my time using their products, or hear me recommend their services to anyone I know. Ever.

Wrong place; wrong time does not even begin to say it.

Well-spoken, Elhanan. Some things shouldn't have a dollar-value attached to them.

Over the last 2-3 yrs, some of the nicest people one could hope to meet have passed from life. Some died due to illness, some to accident, and others to natural causes. Most were older folks, but a few were younger, too. Just learned of another such friend that was found dead today, and this person did nothing but have kind things to say every time we spoke.

A real shame; for her family, friends, and evryone that got to meet her.