Well, I've acquired a system disk. Now I just need to wait for it to arrive. I probably payed far too much for it, but a knowledgeable person told me that this was what I wanted, and I figured that being overcharged was probably preferable to spending another goodness-knows-how-long looking for one. But I do hope that this actually fixes Lucinda and I don't have to go and buy a laptop anyway (after being overcharged for the system disk).

I'm in the computer lab, alternating between being productive and procrastinating. I've gotten most of the SSFFS things done (except for the flyers for Jane Yolen's talk (Madison, when can I expect the dragon? Or are you too busy and I should just go with what I scanned in and fiddled with?).) and will now do fencing fudge-things, and then I'll mail a letter if the campus center is still open, and then I'll read a bit before bed.

I'm enjoying the clothing restoration workshop, but I think I'll hold off on talking about it until I have a convenient way to show some of the pictures I've been taking.

That's all. Goodnight

It sounds like I need a system disk. And not only does it need to be a system disk for Mac OS Panther, which is old, it needs to be a CD, which probably means that it's for a desktop, which is downright archaic. (But thanks, vorindi.) On the plus side, chocochan's brother has been polite and helpful and is actually A Real Person (as opposed to a slightly annoyed automated sorter-and-filer, or a series of unhelpful links on a support website), which is encouraging in the mires of computer mishaps. So he found a system disk on e-bay and I've bid on it and I'll poke it again tomorrow night. And hopefully that will fix the problem.

I had a dream the night before last that my computer was broken, so I went flying through the jungle (or something vaguely like that; there may have been ropes and vines involved, but I don't remember and it was pretty awesome) because that's clearly the most logical thing to do when one's computer is broken, and when I next turned it on, it worked. It was a lovely dream.

And I do need another player for Diplomacy after all because Mel has work. Or perhaps I could run it and play, since I was mainly not playing for her benefit, I believe (thoughts from other players? I won't be offended if you'd rather I didn't play).

My computer. (If you're curious, she came with that name, but I did name the second hard drive Mandy.)

Let me give you a bit of background.

Yesterday after being driven out of my room I came to the CMP and did productive things on the fencing website (it's almost done, yay), then went to lunch, and then regrouped for a knitting circle in the early afternoon. At some point in the late afternoon the knitting circle turned into a knitting-and-Dr. Who-circle and migrated to my room because my bed is more comfy than the kitchenette, and we watched some 4th Doctor. After a while we went to dinner at India House (yum!), and then came back, watched more 4th Doctor, took a break for 9th Doctor because Madison said that the rest of them needed to see Captain Jack Harkness, and then finished the 4th Doctor stuff we'd been watching. I finished another hat (almost a whole hat in one day!). People migrated back to their respective rooms and chocochan and I did some swing dancing. All in all, a lovely day.

I got back to my room and turned my computer on. I almost immediately changed my mind and decided that I could check e-mail in the morning, so rather than waiting for it to turn on and then turning it off again, I hit restart and turned it off when the screen went back. Yes, I know that this is not good for the computer. However, I'd been under the impression that this was a sort of minor not-good-for-the-computer thing, like unplugging a flash drive without properly disconnecting it, rather than a BAD THING that will do terrible things to your computer.

I appear to have been wrong about that. Because now it won't turn on. Or rather, it does, but it won't get past startup. I turn it on, and get the computer-turning-on noise, and the screen goes white-with-the-gray-apple, and the circle underneath spins - and then it stops spinning and I get a message, "You need to restart your computer. You can do this by pressing the restart button or holding down the power button for several seconds," in four different languages. And if I restart it, exactly the same thing happens. (although holding down the power button doesn't seem to do anything at all.)
Two hours of trawling through help websites (in the Campus Center and on Ingrid's computer, bless her), being on hold with Mac support, and crawling around under my computer desk have resulted in:

-resetting the NVRAM and PRAM (holding Command+Option+p+r through startup) has done something, because the screen resolution is different and startup now seems to be operating from an older graphics package, but hasn't changed the error message (although it's now white letters on black rather than black letters on gray)
-holding x during startup after resetting NVRAM and PRAM doesn't change the error message.
-mac support is going to charge me $50 for phone support. I don't think that this is a $50 problem (I hope it's not a $50 problem). If it is a $50 problem, I don't think that it's going to be resolved over the phone.
-I have posted a query on user discussions at Apple - Support, but I'm doubtful whether that's going to produce results.
-I am hungry and it's lunchtime.

Other things that have happened:
-I've discovered how annoying it is to try to troubleshoot online when your computer won't turn on.
-I detected a definite tinge of annoyance in the computer sorter on the apple support page (Well, I'm sorry, but I didn't buy this computer and I don't know off the top of my head what exactly it is, and it won't turn on so I can't get it to tell me, and if I'm going to look on the back of the tower I have to find the correct bit of little text, and if the back of the tower says Power Macintosh G3 but I know that it runs G4, do I tell it G3 or G4? And that computerized voice is pretty impatient).


If any of you have superpowers of fixing Bad Things with computers, that would be nice.