The Paulonomicon

Click the best dog ever. It's a gallery of bizarre black and white pictures completely devoid of context, comment, or explanation.

Before the KU game crushed my spirit, I finished reading The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, on loan to me from Chelsea. My thoughts can be summed up thusly:

What the fuck?

I found myself not quite able to process the whole thing, but was left feeling detached and mildly paranoid; it was like waking up from a fever dream at three in the morning and not knowing when or where you are. It was fascinating and I'm pretty sure I enjoyed it, but now I need to read something fluffy. Mom loaned me The Lovely Bones, but that's gonna have to wait.

Hmm. I watched just enough of the game to get excited and really into it, then have that crushed like a bug.

Fuck sports. Really.

In support of my theory that every song ever written is better when performed by Muppets:

In the great wide category of "Things about Paul's life that you don't care about," : New hard drive arrived, went into laptop without a single problem, and soaked up Windows from the install CDs like, um... something that... soaks... um... goodly. Drive is TONS faster than old drive. Comp rebooted properly. Initial Setup is running smoothly, though as I write this, I'm at one of the bits that went wonky before (and is, ironically, one of the first things I'm going to uninstall.)... YAY!

Rebooting... installing more drivers, applications...

Rebooting...installing MORE drivers, applications...

Rebooting...spinning hourglass, dialog box about things "preparing"...

Rebooting...nondeadly blue screen with progress dots... Win XP splash screen imploring me to wait, please...

"Welcome to Microsoft Windows" This is the sceen that tells me to go to another screen. Although, now it has a couple other useless sentences, a swirly "?" Help button, and sounds that are probably not supposed to be annoying, but are. I am thankful, nonetheless. I will now click "Next". Wish me luck: This is where things went bad (terminally) last time.

YAY!

Setup finished. Rebooting...

Windows has started normally. Now I have to run Update to get everything up to snuff in the Windowsverse, and do a lot of housecleaning to get rid of stuff I don't want (Norton, McAffee, AOL (especially AOL), other annoying bits of bloatware) and add stuff that I do. Fortunately, I have a lot of my installers (Chrome, MSE, Zune, printer...) all on my portable drive, so I don't have to download them.

Hopefully my next post will be from my own computer. Seeya

Once you get around what this guy is doing to the books, this is a pretty cool concept, and I thought I'd post it mainly because I think Chelsea will find it interesting. Click the picture to go to the article and more pictures of his stuff.

I am fairly certain my laptop's hard drive is conking out. After experiencing an increasing number of bizarre glitches and performance problems, and disk-check running itself several times, I decided to do a system restore. I know I had at least two restore points in there. This proved impossible. It failed to work several times.

Now, I had recently done a complete, clean re-install of Windows a couple months ago. Since anything crucial I wanted to keep was on my external HDD, I figured, what the hell? Let's do another one! First, I tried doing it from the drive itself, since the recovery program has its own partition on my 'puter. I got a Blue Screen of Death when I tried to get into the recovery mode. This was just fucking absurd. So I popped in my recovery disk, and booted up from that, and selected the full recovery option. This essentially nukes my hard drive completely and reloads Windows brand new.

This got me as far as the first screen in XP setup, albeit after some glitchiness in the very first stages, (after all the disks are loaded, the system reboots itself, and starts installing programs and drivers. Things were a bit wrong here, but I still had hope). The first setup screen is really just a sentence and a button telling you to go to the next screen. I clicked the button, and the next screen failed to load. It was entirely blank. Rebooting netted me a disk-check (which takes forever, and supposedly fixed bad data & looks for errors on the drive). After that, I was returned to the unloaded setup screen.

I tried to go into the safe-mode, but since Windows technically hadn't been set up, I couldn't do that. There were also no restore points from a previously stable configuration. Trying to enter the recovery/repair mode earned another BSOD.

This all repeated itself when I tried to reinstall from the disks.

I partially blame Gateway for this. I didn't get an actual, genuine Windows XP setup disk with the computer. I had to burn my own set when I got the damned thing. Because of this, I apparently don't have access to some tools that having the real disk provides. Like the ability to run my own disk check, which would be nice since the one that runs on its own is only checking D:. I'd like to be able to check C:, also. But I can't do that from BIOS or the boot menu, or the F8 safe-mode menu. I'd have to schedule it from Windows, which I cannot make work.

So I popped open the back of my laptop, and removed the drive. After a bit of research, I figured out what all the letters and numbers on the label mean, and which other letters and numbers are compatible with them. Armed with this knowledge, I ordered a new drive from AMazon, which will hopefully arrive Thursday. From there, it should be a simple matter to screw it into the sleeve, and screw the sleeve back into the bottom of my laptop. Hopefully, I will be able to install Windows with a minimum of hassle, and end up with a functional computer with about twice the storage I had before.

If this works, I may then upgrade the RAM, too.

If it doesn't, I may then cry. And then I dunno what.

I am posting this from my new Zune with its itty bitty keyboard. Also, my computer is flaking out, so fingers crossed, eh?

 Great.

My MP3 player's hard drive failed this afternoon.  I rather liked U2's remixed version of Discotheque from their Greatest Hits 1990-2000 album (it sounds like an actual U2 song), but my little Creative Zen Vision apparently thought otherwise and committed some sort of PMP version of Seppuku halfway through it.

Also, I forgot to renew my car's tags.  This hasn't actually bit me on the ass yet.  Yet.

 It's November third.

Two days ago, I began seeing Christmas commercials.

Those of you that know me will be aware that this means I am going to start getting my panties in a twist about Christmas merchandise and commercials showing up.

And those twisted panties are metaphorical.  And they don't have reindeer or candy canes on them.  Don't judge me.

Also, NaNoWriMo has given me the opportunity to use the word "cannibalistically", which is (surprisingly) a real word as far as MS Works's dictionary is concerned.  Rock on.

(Oh, on that front, I'm lagging about a day and a half behind, since I spent yesterday either at work or asleep, with nothing in between except a brief meal in the evening, and Sunday--all of it-- was spent at work with a couple hours of staggering exhaustion at home tossed in as an afterthought.)

 700 words short of my day's goal.  Exhausted beyond reason.  Going BACK to work until 7 pm after the 3am-1030am shift Ialready fucking worked today.

Oh, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Seriously fucked up.  Really.  Damn

    Well, the shadowy conspiracy dedicated solely to irritating me has struck again.  This time they managed to switch which day was the 25th this month.  Instead of being Monday as previously planned, it got changed to Sunday.  Bastards.

  Anyway, since in my heart it is actually the 25th today, Happy anniversary to the Orkwiseses, who I am glad to see have not been chopped slowly into tiny pieces, despite having visited a place named Turpentine Creek, Arkansas.

  Seriously.  How is that NOT Hatchetdeath Central??

 After Sarah's post about the Star Wars concert, this seems wildly appropriate.  Found it through /film.

 It's ten minutes long and the music is annoying.

It's also ten minutes long and features BULLETS HITTING THINGS filmed at ONE MILLION FRAMES PER SECOND.

Put some actual decent music on the stereo and marvel:

 I might be totally unraveling somebody's mind here, but upon seeing this I immediately thought of Sarah and a particular (and, admittedly extraordinarily terrible) fear she once mentioned to the Nuthouse.  It's monumentally fucked on its own, even without past childhood traumas to spice up the sauce.  I totally sympathize, so I'm putting it behind a link instead of just gluing it to the post.  Hope you don't have a migraine right now.

Don't go to sleeeeeep....

 I have a problem.

On my MP3 player, I have a playlist of all the Star Trek scores.  They are, of course, in order.  After the latest Star Trek came out, I bought the score and ripped it to my player.  I have not put it into the playlist because I can't decide WHERE to put it, and this is of monumental importance.

One could argue that it belongs before Star Trek: The Motion Picture since, chronologically, it takes place a long time before the timeframe of TMP.

However, it doesn't take place in the same continuity, either.  It's a totally different timeline;  One in which the events of the familiar franchise either won't happen, or will be drastically altered.  In this case, it would make sense to place it at the end of the list, which would also preserve the real-world release date order of the list.

I'm leaning towards putting it at the end, but I don't want to make a huge mistake.

      Saw this on gizmodo.  Somebody chopped together and auto-tuned a bunch of clips from Carl Sagan's Cosmos.  Enjoy.

Christ.  So, my computer freaks out, and after much frustration, I decide to restore the OS.  This fails spectacularly multiple times, but finally it works.  Thank god I backed up (I hope) everything I want to keep.  Now, though, my computer is technically about four or five years out of date.  Some of my device drivers are broken and won't fix (like the sound card,  think, and definitely my USB ports).  I hope dl'ing the latest service pack helps this.  Also, I have to get my security programs properly re-installed...

God almightly I'm frustrated.  I've been over two weeks without proper internet.  I feel so...disconnected.  Ugh.

Thankfully(?) all my friends are used to not hearing from me for long stretches of time, so it's likely nobody really missed me.

I COULD'VE BEEN DEAD IN A DITCH SOMEWHERE!!!

God I love technology.  I got my XBox hooked up to the internet, and am now streaming episodes of The IT Crowd through it from Netflix.  Also, the game Portal?  In contention as my favorite game ever.

Now back to chocolate cake and wine.

Read through this thread about how situations in movies would play out differently in reality.  It's hilarious.
***
via Reuters:
     The city of Hill Valley, California was shocked this morning by the destruction of the Twin Pines mall shortly after one o'clock this morning.  Authorities have verified that the blast, which vaporized everything within a square mile of the mall, was thermonuclear in nature.  Agents from the FBI and NSA, working with local law-enforcement agencies, quickly linked the blast to a recent investigation into the activities of one Emmett Brown.  Brown had recently come to the attention of the federal government as having links to a highly militant terrorist cell operating out of Libya.  Locally, Brown has long been viewed with suspicion by authorities and the scientific community for his eccentric and allegedly dangerous experimentation, conducted in the densely populated downtown area.  Through arduous legal wrangling greased with Brown's not-inconsiderable fortune, this modern-day 'mad scientist' has so far avoided any significant penalties or setbacks to his research.
     It is thought at this time that Brown was developing a large bomb for the Libyan terrorists, a theory supported by the discovery of plans which detailed the use of a DeLorean Motor Company DMC-12 as a delivery device.  Brown's residence/laboratory was in shambles, and had already been designated a crime scene early yesterday after noise complaints were filed.  It is theorized that Brown had attempted to use a large sound-amplification device to obliterate evidence of his links to the Libyan terrorist cell.
     Further evidence has led authorities to name local high school senior Martin McFly as a person-of-interest in the case, although he has been reported missing by his family.  It is presumed by some, according to sources in law-enforcement that McFly may have been killed in the explosion at the mall.
     Authorities stress that no accurate numbers can be given at this time, but the unofficial death-toll of this tragedy is presumed to be over three thousand, and is likely to climb much higher as the effects of radiation take their toll on the densely populated area in the weeks to come.
***
  Any ideas?