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Thu.Oct.06.2005

1:53 am EDT        63°F (17°C) in Toms Brook, VA

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What a long, strange, fucked-up six days it’s been since my last update. This past Friday night, less than a day after I made the update previous to this one, my old Dell laptop decided to crap out on me; in particular, the PCMCIA slot, upon which I relied for any form of Internet access, failed catastrophically. The insertion of any PCMCIA device into the slot now causes the system to spontaneously and immediately shut down completely. There are some other sub-systems, such as the DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, whose status is questionable; I couldn’t make sure that they would work as intended 100% of the time. What was perhaps the worst thing, though, was the fact that the PCMCIA slot problems apparently fried the Sierra Wireless AirCard 750 that I had been using to access T-Mobile Internet service; that stopped working as well.

I finally have most everything migrated to a new Gateway MX6625 laptop I purchased on Sunday, and on Tuesday, I bought a new Sony Ericsson GC79 device from T-Mobile. The whole disaster set me back almost $1,600 by the time everything was said and done, but I must say that this Gateway is by leaps and bounds a far superior machine to the Dell. That Dell laptop had been nothing but trouble, basically going all the way back to day one, and I was not about to sink another few hundred dollars into that pile of shit to get it repaired after buying all the parts I’ve previously had to replace.

Needless to say, I’ve fallen well behind when it comes to keeping up with online correspondence, and I have a fair bit of that to catch up with. Although I don’t have a ton of time to share it here tonight, I have a rather interesting story to tell on that topic from a little over a week ago; I’ll get around to that when time permits.

As if my old computer being a pile of shit wasn’t enough, my truck had to do the same thing. I spent most of Tuesday and a fair bit of yesterday in the shop having a number of engine-related issues fixed; the most serious of these was a failed fuel injector, which meant that for a couple days, I was running down the road firing on only five cylinders. Additionally, I got the cause of some of the strange turbo noises fixed; it turns out that I had a few clamps loose along the intake path, and some of the pressurized air leaving the turbo was leaking out into the atmosphere.

I have far too much shit to do between now and tomorrow morning, when I have to deliver this load in South Carolina.