Rise of the machines... or was it "fall" @2007-11-03 02:43:14listening to: Antonín Dvořák - Slavonic Dances
The tendency of computer equipment troubles to leave you along for a long time to suddenly appear in bunches might really produce the impression of some kind of malicious higher force being involved, sneakily waiting for a convenient moment to let you take the full blow of technical malfunctions, general hardware inaptitude and software bugs. Of course, common sense says this is bogus... but I think common sense died the usual way alongside with my NAT router earlier today (which started the quite impacting four-hit combo) and still is taking its time to reboot.
Said NAT router's slow and painful demise was almost instantly to be followed by a sudden and inexplicable
freezedown of my desktop machine; the forceful reboot and chkdsk run to follow it left, among other things I have yet to discover, my foobar2000 playlists (I'm glad I backupped those...) and half my Trillian contact list
(meh, those guys were annoying anyway...) in ruins. Oh well.
Fast forward to 30 minutes ago. As usual, after getting yelled at to shut down and go to sleep by mom for nearly an hour, I decide to do my everyday switch to using my indispensable laptop computer in bed.
*plug in*
*press power-on button*
...
Loud clapping noise.
Lights go off, distinct smell of gunpowder (Why gunpowder? ...tomorrow, I'll so have a look at the warranty bill. If it "just so" happened to expire within the last two days, I'm going to laugh) fills the air.
"Oh well", I think, "looks like I'll have to go to sleep early today..."
Having booted up the laptop (now battery-powered) and logged in, I am confronted with yet another surprise, which, on its own, might be moderately interesting and probably even worth taking a screenshot of and posting on some board. The object in question is a dialogue box not unlike the well-known "application x crashed, would you like to send some unrelated personal data to Microsoft?" window. Except modal, repeating itself in an infinite loop and telling me that explorer.exe was shut down "for security reasons". No further explanation. Great success.
As a bottom line, I am now logged into the non-administrator account and enjoying my remaining 39% of battery. I'll probably have to think of something to do for another 2 hours... | |