(no subject)

So I finally get myself awak last night. Online, enjoying myaelf... and poof, suddenly everything 'netish is dead. And the status light on the DSL modem is burning an evil red. Right. Well, maybe it's my end. I dumped power to the modem, waited 20 mins, then turned it back on.

And it's still red. Hrm. That doesn't look much like it's a problem on my end at all. Forty five minutes on the phone with Verizon's (very much non-)technical support reveals that the local concentrator (or whatever they call it) is down. No answer on the phones, no answer on ping, nothing. A couple more minutes revealed the problem: the entire building was without power, so the fancy multi-function phones were out, as were all of the relay servers.

I don't think I've ever had this kind of thing go wrong, before. Essentially, my power and equipment was intact, and my ISP had lost power. *pounds head on desk* The promised to have everything fixed as soon as possible... 5 hours later, I've got green lights again. Whoopie.

Yeah, whatever. I need to button up Mom's machine and run this devil down to her. Means I need to find clothes. Right. 'm outta here. Try and be good, darlings.

(no subject)

Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.

*snicker*

(no subject)

After six hours at my Mom's, her new 1.8ghz Duron system is set up. I'll have to run down again in a few days with the shutdown-loop patch and the keyboard that got forgotten, but she's done. When I got there, I discovered that I'd managed to leave my screwdriver set -and- the new keyboard for her system here at the house. Over an hour away. Forty five minutes was burned going to a local computer shop and picking up a $5.35 AT->PS2 adapter... to substitute for the $4.85 keyboard I stupidly left here. *snerk* My own fault. From there it was an hour to amputate CDROM and harddrive out of her aging Pentium 200MMX system and slap 'em into the new Duron, and then carefully transfer email and document files and clean everything up.

And then it was nearly four hours soothing Mom's nerves about 'all the changes', and stepping her through things until she relaxed and realized that not a whole lot had changed, for what she does. She uses Juno for email. She makes spreadsheets and document files. No webbrowsing. No video viewing or editing. No music files. The biggest transition for her is moving from MS Office 97 to Open Office... and after she realized that OO does everything MSO did, and more, she finally relaxed there, as well. I killed a sixpack of Cokes, a pepperoni and onion pizza from -the- best little pizza making place in the world, and only added a handful of grey hairs. The two and a half hours of transit time on top of everything hammered the nails in my null energy coffin.

I'm fried. It'll be an early night for the Ellie, yes. The outlay of energy has completely destroyed my hopes to curl up in the happy warmth of RP tonight. That... doesn't make me happy. Withdrawal's an ugly thing. :p Which means I'll sleep tonight, get up for a few hours tomorrow morn, and take a lengthy nap tomorrow afternoon... which'll put me back on my up-all-night schedule. Yes. There will be much rejoicing.

I'm going to wrap up the other things still standing out and then crash. G'nite.