Middle America's Worldview

Well, yesterday didn't go according to plan. My work computer crapped out on me, again. I had it on all weekend. I rarely turn it off. I had to be somewhere yesterday afternoon and took 1/2 day off. Since everyone is not on the bandwith I knew I had to deal with a phone dialing into work. I checked if I could still dialin RAS ( Remote Access System ) and get to my work. Yep, the old dialing into with a copper phone line. After being on cable for so long now, I had to ask the guys at Corporate to pull the string harder. After 2 failed attempts I was in. Once in I found I could get to my Lotus Notes easy enough, but nothing else. VPN nor internet access wouldn't work. Hence I could not really get into my work. I had my Monday morning work call. Each Monday morning the interface team has a meeting to hash out their projects, any issues, what will I be working on this week, any rollouts of new interfaces, ect. I mentioned the fact I couldn't get into Citrix with RAS and they responded, I can. Oh well maybe I just need to reboot my laptop. I was thinking it would refresh the memory blah blah blah.

After the call and I made re-arrangments of my evening meetings; I took the plunge and rebooted my PC. I was greeted with an unpleasant blue screen. The white information was giving me the message of a software or hardware upgrade is causing problems and my startup didn't startup due to possible damage that could be done(or something to that effect). Ahh crap. So I did what every intellegent I.S. person does in this experience. I rebooted my PC again___and again___and again. Shit. It still doesn't come up. I tried F8, F10. Looked at my BIOS. Attempted startup on safemode, safemode with networking, safemode with command prompt. I tried startup with last known working configs (didn't know that was an option till now ). Still the same blue screen with white lettering. Sigh.

OK, time to call in the pros. I called a PCLan group buddy of mine. Basically, told him what is occuring and what I had done. I received the one question I hate. "Did you recently install anything new"? Like what am I going to say? Yeah, that cracked warez I received online. The dude told me it was clean. Yeah right.__ The last thing I put on the stupid thing was the graphic driver, he helped me with. So the end result is me fedexing it overnight, hoping like hell they can fix it and resend it to me by Wednesday. Until then, I am a duck out of water. I literally cannot do anything without my laptop. I live online. I am going to have them send me the Citrix and VPN software on cd when they return my laptop to me. I can put it on my home PC for a backup. But still this sucks. I am suppose to be oncall this week, but I will lose at least tonight. I already lost last night oncall.

Well, here's hoping I get the thing back and not a call saying, dude I need to order a new harddrive, with the holiday coming up, it will be like next week.

Site update: I hadded a couple of links and I will be removing the John Kerry links soon.