Off-Line, the Unexpected Option

Despite my Nerd rating - click on the logo to find yours -

I managed to find myself in a variety of unexpectedly off-line situations recently, thus the long silence ... caused by that off-lineness and a bit of other stuff in another post or two to come.

The most astonishing, perhaps, was to find, deep in the Oregon woodlands, but not out of civilization entirely, I could connect, but only by dial-up, with the astonishing rate of 12 mbps, which is, in computer terms, not dial-up at all (usually around 26 mbps), but kind of like blood pressure in the human too low to actually make urine.

So this nerd was without nerdy toys for quite a while.

Oh, and did I mention that my laptop, in perfectly good condition otherwise, has sprung a loose connection in its totally inaccessible hard-drive (Even though I had my trusty mini-Phillips screwdriver with me) Dell hard-drives are abnormal, buried, and made totally useless for adding to an exterior shell etc. if problems occur, be warned.

Just to connect was a matter of shaking the b#$%^rd, flipping the switch, and getting the dreaded "No bootable disc" message for, oh, 45 minutes to an hour or so. Each time thinking, ah, that's the direction of the shake, only for next time that direction to be c#$p, and some other pressure, or shake, or tap, or squeeze to be the one. Since it's also a heavy b#$%^rd, at least I was getting an upper-body workout!

Home now, to great new, also Dell to be fair, computer -- see you again soon!