Sleeping Monkey

Have you ever had one of those days, that goes so bad, it it hardly seems like it could have actually happened? Well that was me today. My life is pretty much nothing but a steady stream of bad days, but today was 10 times worse than it usually is.

When I woke this morning, my knees, my back, and my neck were killing me. Which is par for the course, I have a body which is about twice my actual age. So I stumble to the bathroom, and the only thing I could find was Tylenol Arthritis pills. Why they were even there in the first place, I have no idea, but I figured, the hell with it, I’d take them. They eventually worked, so what ever.

As the morning went by, I was sitting at the computer, watching a movie using the WatchNow feature on netflix. I’m sitting there in this uncomfortable chair the whole time thinking, man it would be nice if I could sit in bed and watch this on my TV. But then I think to myself, what the fuck? Why can’t I?

I peak at the back of my laptop and see there is TV Out S-video port back there, look over at the TV and I got an RCA converter with an S-Video port. So I’m like, hell, why don’t I just go buy an S-Video cable?

I’m a lazy piece of shit, so I figured I would just go do that later in the afternoon.

As time is going by, It gets to be like 11am and the mail came. So I went out to the mail box, and was walking up the drive way looking at my collection of crap, I get in the garage, look over at my car, and notice the hood is sticking up like an inch. So I’m like what the hell?

I go for a closer inspection, the front of my car is all fucked up. Some cock sucker in the parking lot at work, or at Wegmans must have backed into me. It had to be a pick up truck, or an SUV with a trailer hitch. It’s that exact hight. And the impact zone if really small and obvious. But it actually did A LOT of damage. The fiberglass part of the front where the logo is, is totally cracked. The chrome around the grill on the drivers side is half broken off. The grill it’s self is pushed in, there is a crack in the bumper, and it tripped one of the tension spot in the hood, so that has ripples in it. And with the grill pushed back, it throws off where the latch for the hood is, so the hood won’t fully close. It closes and latches shut, but it sticks up about an inch or so.

The thing that sucks is that, the front part, as it is on my newer cars, is one giant piece. To replace it I’m basically going to have to replace the entire front end of the car. I already know how much that costs, because it was all replaced 2 years ago when some jackass ran into it then, and it came to $2400.

I don’t even know if I’m going to fix it. You don’t notice it unless you actually look for it. The car is paid off, and only has 35,000 miles on it, and I don’t want to put any money into it, I’ll probably get a new car in the spring any how. But my options are to go to insurance, put in a claim, have to pay the deductible, and watch my rates go up for the next 7 years. Or pay out of pocket. Neither option I really care for.

So that sucked ass.

Later on in the day I got my ass in gear, went and picked up the Infamous Jonntnat, and went out to run errands. Once of those was to go to Radio Shack to buy the S-Video cable. Seriously, what the fuck is up with Radio Shack?

I haven’t actually been in one of them in a long time. I actually only go there is I need a cable for something. It’s either drive 4 minutes to go there, or drive a half hour out to where the real stores are.

Who the hell has Radio Shack not gone out of business? Seriously, this isn’t 1985 where they are the hot hit. Seriously, they were cool when you could go there and buy remote control cars, or Atari games. But now days, who the fuck goes to Radio Shack to buy an HD TV, or a computer?

We were there for like 3 minutes, and in that time, BOTH of the sales people came up and asked us if we needed help, TWICE. That’s right, being asked if we need help every 45 second.

When I go to check out, the dude is all asking me 20 fucking questions, and was like, “So, what are you going to be doing with this?”

What the fuck business is it of yours douche bag? If I want to buy S-Video cable to use to beat prostitutes, or to tie around my neck during my marathon autoerotic asphyxiation masturbation sessions, that’s my perogative. So fuck you.

The question kind of bugged me. Because is was a stupid question. What are you going to do with it? What the fuck do you think I’m going to do with it. It only does one thing. I’m not going to be using it to fix the toaster, or mow the lawn. But even if I was, it’s still none of your fucking business.

So fast forward a few hours, I’m sitting at home, and go to set this all up. Now I’ve set up S-Video eleventy billion times. It’s not hard. Turn off the computer, turn off the TV, plus in the Cable, turn on the TV, turn on the computer. Computer boots up, recognizes new display adapter, click use desktop, click ok. Open graphic properties, set resolution to something that will work, pick adapter 2. Done.

But this did not go well at all. I plug the cable in, and the computer has a shit fix. No display shows up on the TV. And the computer starts running like shit. So I’m like, ok, fuck it, unplug everything, try again.

But then I notice my LAN connection is gone. Open up a webpage, no dice. So I’m like, ok, go power cycle the modem and router. Reboot the computer, still no connection. Go out to the living room, check the desk top out there, worked fine. Came back to my room, hooked up my other laptop, worked fine. Checked the back of the Laptop for the NIC and the LED is flashing Amber. So I’m like what the fuck.

I didn’t feel like hunting around for driver disks, and I had no connection, and didn’t feel like downloading updated drivers and firmware to my thumb drive on another computer, so I’m like screw it, I’ll just down a system restore. Checked my restore check points, and I had one from earlier in the morning when everything was working. So did the system restore.

I don’t think it could have gone any worse if I tried.

System restarted, and I got nothing. Just a blank screen for 15 minutes. So I’m like, fuck, the computer is not P.O.S.Ting. That usually means hardware problem, I would assume the hardware failure would be the NIC, and the laptop has an integrated NIC. Which means new motherboard.

I’ll never replace a fucking motherboard in a store bought laptop. I paid like $950 for the thing, and the motherboard alone would probably be $700, not worth it.

So I look at the thing and the LCD is black, but a lighter black. It had P.O.S.Ted. But there was nothing there. I hit Cntl, Alt, Delete, brought up task manager. It did launch most essential services, but DWM and the Explorer would not launch. I tried to launch them manually. But no go.

So at this point, I’m like fuck it, Format.

I have a 500GB hard driver, but I was unable to back up an image of it. It would freeze and crash. But I did have 75GB free on the other laptop, and have an 80GB external drive, and a 20GB thumb drive. The external drive would not work, it needed drivers installed, and the optical drive was not working, autorun was stopped, and I couldn’t get into explorer. The thumbdrive luckily I would just pop in, So I sat there for like 2 hours copying over 18GB worth of stuff at a time to the thumb driver, then copying that over to either the external drive, or the other laptop.

When it was all said and done I ended up losing about 300GB worth of stuff.

So I go hunt for the Restore disks, since the laptop didn’t have one of those 1 button recovery consoles.

So I spend over an hour rolling the system back to the factory defaults.

I get the whole thing back up and running, reformatted, nothing on it. Plug in my USB devices, all good. Plug in my ethernet cable, all goo…….. wait, nope, still fucked up.

So now I’m pissed, I’m like what the fuck.

So I open up a command prompt, ping 127.0.0.1 just to make sure the card even fucking works. It was fine, do an ipconfig and it’s coming up with a 169.254.0.1 IP address. No connection. So I go to the other laptop, I download the latest drivers for the NIC, download a BIOS update for the system it’s self, download a Firmware update. Install all of those, try it again, nothing.

At this point I’m pulling my hair out, there is no reason for this not to work. So I think maybe the ethernet cable is bad. I got the second laptop, make sure it work, which it did. Pop out the ethernet and connect that to the other laptop, still nothing. Power Cycle modem and router, still nothing. Pop in the ethernet from the bad laptop to the one what had worked, tried that to make sue the cable was ok, picked up an IP right off the bat.

So now I’m lost. Laptop 1 will not get a connection from either Ethernet connection 1 or 2. Meanwhile Laptop 2 gets a connection from both. And Desktop 3 was fine the hole time.

So open up command prompt, start pinging shit. I see that the laptop could resolve a host name to an IP ( for example google.com = 64.233.187.99 ). But it couldn’t fully resolve the host name. Pings to the host came back with 100% packet loss. Pings to the IP came back with 75% packet loss, but at least something got through.

So after farting around with it, found that I could not reach the Primary DNS server with the ISP. Which makes no fucking sense, since the other computers can. I rebuilt the Winsock just to be safe, but that didn’t do anything.

Just for shits and giggles, I plugged the laptop directly into the modem, and by passed the router. Restarted, ipconfig……… and got an IP. Pinged google, got it, opened up a browser, was able to get to everything.

So now I’m totally lost. And I even do Hardware support for a living. I can not for the life of me figure out why the one laptop can not communicate with the DNS server when going through the router. It resolves hostnames fine internally. Even just for the hell of it, I installed the linksys software, which is fucking useless, which did no good.

So I have no idea what the hell is going on, and I lost 300GB worth of shit in the process and wasted 5 hours of my life.

So yeah, that’s just a portion of what I’ve been dealing with today. It fucking sucked. The only redeeming moment of the day was going out to dinner later in the evening with the little buddy. I hadn’t been able to see her in a while with our schedules, so it was nice to get to hang out for more than 5 minutes.