The Odyssey

Okay, so... leave it to computers in this entire mess to somehow make me feel like the stupid one. Percent of current problems caused by myself: now 50%. I had a conversation something like this today...

"Okay, so you are Terry?"
"Well, no, actually you guys spelled my name wrong, but that's not the problem."
"Oh, er, okay."
"Actually, I got the CD Wednesday, but it seems to be the wrong one."
"Can you give me the item number?"
[Long, long conversation involving a lot of numbers, then horrific hold music]
"Well, Terry, that should be the correct part. I'm going to give you an address where you can download a file that'll fix the error."
"Err..."
"Just download it to your computer and run it, and it'll..."
"Um, my harddrive is kind of dead, I'm not going to be able to do that..."
[pause]
"You can burn it to a bootable CD."

At which point I resign myself to my fate, which is beating my head against various desks while talking to tech support to bustle around everywhere attempting to find a way to make an uncooperative computer burn a workable CD from an ISO that actually, you know, boots. A while later I discovered that a large part of the problem I was having with the roomie's computer was that Nero was only burning to... the computer. To make the situation more confused, though, apparently her computer always hums and vibrates like the CD drive is running. It's quite impressive, the things that computers have come up with to thwart me. But, after much fretting over whether I was accidentally going to re-write my roomie's DMI data, I got the Toshiba fix-y file working and it kindly provided me with a fix that'd allow me to burn an ISO from Windows. An ISO! From Windows' CD-burning support! Fancy that! (AND IT WORKS! VICTORY IS MINE! ... I am so off to rescue what I can from my hard drive. I almost want to take a picture of the loading screen for Knoppix. So happy. Freaking Nero! Freaking computers! Freaking evil harddrive! But aww, my computer is functioning on some level, and that makes me want to give it a hug.)

Edit [midnight!]: My hard drive! Its contents are still alive under there. And, contrary to allllll the trouble I had mounting an external last time I had an adventure with Knoppix, I'm actually having luck with my thumb drive. Methinks I'll be living off that thing for the next few weeks. But omgomg, I can sit at my own computer and do work. That is such a comforting thing. And to think I was about to give in and borrow a laptop.

Edit [one a.m.]: I'm getting hard drive death noises. But all the important stuff? And most of the unimportant stuff? Safe and sound on my external hard drive now. And I've also discovered that it's possible to download things to the thumb drive. Woo! I am set. Open office, functional operating system, everything backed up. I will indeed survive the last two weeks of school without giving in. Victory!