meta tech support, and irc

Date: 2002-04-01 08:56:59

Yesterday, Gem and I made an incursion into Conard Hall to visit room 319, where Bethany resides. Bethany's computer has been acting up lately, so she asked me to come look at it. I drug Gem along because she knows a little more about fixing Windows when it breaks than I do. We nuked some software (including AOL that we're not really sure how it got there) and removed a bunch of programs from startup, which helped. Next up was the cd-rw, which had been working for a month and promptly stopped working when some of Bethany's friends were screwing with it. We poked around and concluded that the drive was completely screwed up, since its light didn't come on at boot and it didn't show up in the drivers list.

The only conclusion, then, was that Compaq needed to replace the drive, since it was broken and still under warranty. Gem called tech support, pretended to be Bethany, and went through the other end of what she does on a daily basis: tech support. Gem enjoyed pretending to be a stupid customer and dutifully went through the process of deleting drivers and other stuff, which failed to do anything useful, so they guy on the other end was forced to conclude that the drive was broken, so they're sending a replacement. (Gem was disturbed that they didn't ask her to re-seat the power and data cables. We did, just to double-check, but it didn't do anything useful.) So we get to make another incursion into Conard Hall when the drive arrives to fix it.

I couldn't resist the urge to sign up for Netflix. I spent an hour last night enqueuing movies and ranking movies. After a while of ranking, I asked Netflix to reveal to me movies I might like and Memento showed up on top. (I hadn't ranked it yet.) I therefore have to conclude that its ranking system is rather good. (I imagine they have a couple of math PhD's behind the scenes running the hairy statistics that make it possible.)

Due to firewall issues on Rage, irc.festing.org has been moved to Ziyal. My investigations reveal that the server should be up and running for tonight's regularly-scheduled mass irc at 1900 PST. My calendar reveals that this will be the last mass irc to exist in standard time for a while. I eagerly await the arrival of daylight savings time, since this morning I got up at 0700 thinking it was 0800. Morning light is not my friend.