"Crater Lake In Winter"
Well, the last twenty-four hours have been full to the brim with all sorts of interesting things. If you remember from yesterday it was rainy in Fort Worth. The rain continued through the morning then as the temperature dropped in the afternoon, the rain turned to various forms of frozen precipitation (except for snow) and continued pouring ice down until the wee hours this morning. After morning errands and lunch with A, I came home fully intending to get some rest. How wrong I was to expect that to come to pass. To back track a little, I have in the last few days downloaded the new Windows 7 Beta intending to do some testing to see if the evil empire had actually made some improvements making 7 what Vista was supposed to be. I had thus installed a second hard drive to serve as the test module to keep from screwing up my C drive. I thought it would be a snap but again I was wrong. The first clue was after I had installed the aux hard drive, my DVD drive chose at that moment to take a nosedive into hardware failure preventing the installation of W& as the download was an ISO file you had to burn to DVD. I had already formatted the drive and was set to go, except the DVD drive was recognized by the computer but the drive itself could not read any media inserted into it. I called over to my neighbor D who is the other half of one of my employees and an IT consultant. He brought his DVD drive over to test the system to e if it was a system error or a hardware failure. His drive would read the media, so we started our adventure into W7 land.
We got to the point where you select the drive/partition where you want to install the OS several, several times. The problem was W& uses Vista-esque drivers and neither I or D could find one that would update the driver for the primary IDE channel. Now this causes a couple of problems. Number one, W7 does not recognize the hard drives because it can't find the driver for the IDE channel; and Number two, the installation will not proceed as planned. With our combined skills and speedy Internet access we combed the highways and byways trying to solve the problem. Ultimately we could not so I now have a spare hard drive installed, formatted and empty; I still have all my data; and I also have a DVD drive that does not work. I can replace that for very little, so that is really no big deal. However I was kinda looking forward to testing Darth Gates new baby. I may still write them and ask them WTF, over? I do not foresee a solution barring a newer base framework and motherboard that would be Vista/W7 compatible. But that seems like a lot of BS for not much reward, I think I will just stick with XP for now and save for a Mac!
Here is a little something funny I ran across that is in the same vein as my 6 hour adventure into W7 land:
We got to the point where you select the drive/partition where you want to install the OS several, several times. The problem was W& uses Vista-esque drivers and neither I or D could find one that would update the driver for the primary IDE channel. Now this causes a couple of problems. Number one, W7 does not recognize the hard drives because it can't find the driver for the IDE channel; and Number two, the installation will not proceed as planned. With our combined skills and speedy Internet access we combed the highways and byways trying to solve the problem. Ultimately we could not so I now have a spare hard drive installed, formatted and empty; I still have all my data; and I also have a DVD drive that does not work. I can replace that for very little, so that is really no big deal. However I was kinda looking forward to testing Darth Gates new baby. I may still write them and ask them WTF, over? I do not foresee a solution barring a newer base framework and motherboard that would be Vista/W7 compatible. But that seems like a lot of BS for not much reward, I think I will just stick with XP for now and save for a Mac!
Here is a little something funny I ran across that is in the same vein as my 6 hour adventure into W7 land:
As a consequence of my adventure into W7 land, I only got about two hours sleep before going to work at 10 PM. Of course by this time, everything was already ice covered and treacherous. There had been more than 200 accidents already and the stupid part of the evening was just beginning. On any given night we have a colorful assortment of characters who visit the store in the overnight hours. There are a few who have a less than firm grasp on reality and others who are in various states of inebriation from various causes, some legal, a lot not. To look at it logically, it is 20 degrees outside, frozen shit is falling on frozen streets and sidewalks, the house is warm and toasty, yet you have the munchies. What possesses a person to come out in an ice storm wearing naught but shorts, a T-shirt and flip flops for two candy bars at 3 in the morning? or the guy who comes slip sliding up on foot at 4AM to buy a $105 worth of chips, cereal , Starbucks and cigarettes? It was things like this all night that had my night guy and I just rolling all night long. We did not get a lot of cops in like normal, they were too busy cleaning up after stupid fuckers on the freeways to stop for coffee. One thing about people in Texas, you get any precipitation, whether or not it is frozen, and these people take their brains out and set them on a shelf before getting behind the wheel. For some reason, Texans think it is their God given right to travel 70 MPH, no matter the road conditions, while talking on their cell phones and/or drinking beer. Too many of them find out the error of their ways in spectacular fashion on nights like last night.
After the night had passed I got a lot of laugh watching people try to climb the small incline onto the overpass at our intersection. It was a real hoot watching those unfamiliar with driving on ice as they attempted to get across the bridge over Beach Street. Of course the next shift ran late getting in because of the ice and I did not get out of there until nearly 9:30AM which is why this post is so late in coming to you. Before I forget to mention this to you. A week or so ago, we cruised right on past 300,000 visitors and we now stand at 304,185. The spectrum of countries from which you guys visit continues to be broad and world inclusive with visitors from 104 countries so far this month. Thank you guys for coming back day after day to check out my little corner of the world. It is already noon time, so I need to wrap this up but not before I introduce another new themed set of eye candy photos for you today. A Kiss Is Still A Kiss... is a collection for the romantic in all of us. Until next time as always, Enjoy!
After the night had passed I got a lot of laugh watching people try to climb the small incline onto the overpass at our intersection. It was a real hoot watching those unfamiliar with driving on ice as they attempted to get across the bridge over Beach Street. Of course the next shift ran late getting in because of the ice and I did not get out of there until nearly 9:30AM which is why this post is so late in coming to you. Before I forget to mention this to you. A week or so ago, we cruised right on past 300,000 visitors and we now stand at 304,185. The spectrum of countries from which you guys visit continues to be broad and world inclusive with visitors from 104 countries so far this month. Thank you guys for coming back day after day to check out my little corner of the world. It is already noon time, so I need to wrap this up but not before I introduce another new themed set of eye candy photos for you today. A Kiss Is Still A Kiss... is a collection for the romantic in all of us. Until next time as always, Enjoy!
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