Fixed!

Nothing too interesting here, but I managed to fix my home PC this morning. I guess the C drive is starting to crap out intermittently. It probably got stuck or overheated, and when the machine rebooted the BIOS couldn’t find it and promoted the next drive on the list to startup. All I had to do was designate the correct drive as the boot drive and it worked.

I warned you, not interesting.

Speaking of not interesting, lately I’ve been spending all my weeknights in a Starbucks somewhere, reading the Japanese translation of Catcher in the Rye. Had I not lost my iPod I probably wouldn’t have bought the book. I use my retro-cool Sony Clie as an electronic dictionary (it kicks the Nintendo DS’s ass eight ways into next Thursday) and footnote all the new words and phrases in red pen. On the train home (usually the last one) I re-read everything and try to think of ways I’d use in daily life the phrases that are new to me, so that I’m “owning” them instead of just trying to memorize them.

The company I work for is in negotiations with a major international publisher to produce a podcast for them. One of the biggest publishers in the world by far, but you’ll never guess in a million years which one, and when I can finally tell you you’ll smack yourself in the forehead. I can’t even give you a hint. I won’t be the voice, just the producer, and when you find out who the publisher is you’ll understand why. If all goes well, it’ll start in July.

I need some computer help

Booting my home PC by using an Ubuntu live CD shows that all my drives are OK. The problem is that Windows XP isn’t booting, as if either the C drive’s boot sector is toast or the system directory is somehow corrupted. All I see after the BIOS boots is a black screen with a flashing cursor.

Does anyone know of a utility that might be able to fix the problem?

Learned the hard way

Inscribe your e-mail address on the back of your iPod so that if you, say, accidentally drop it when you get out of the car, the person who finds it might be kind enough to return it to you.

I’m totally iPod-less, and I feel utterly naked without it. And my home PC died. Again. Luckily, I only had my system and programs on the C drive that went. On the bright side…gosh, I can’t think of one. I’m too broke to replace either of them.

OK, on the bright side, now my kids can’t fight over who gets to play on the computer.

Slickr: The Flickr screensaver

If you like browsing through Flickr as much as I do (or if you want your son’s latest photos to be your screensaver), get it here. It does what you’d expect it to, plus two tricks:

  • Press D and the current photo becomes your destop picture.
  • Press the space bar to go to the current photo’s Flickr page.