was going to blog yesterday... started with a few words during the day, and was going to actually write something when i got home. but i didn't count on the trials and tribulations of PC ownership to rear its meddlesome head. ended up spending most of my evening trying to unbreak my onboard NIC. this whole thing actually started sometime ago, when my brother fried both sticks of RAM in his pc, and so i had to help troubleshoot. well, he only fried one - i'm pretty sure the second stick only started burning after i came on the scene, but that'd be because the socket on the motherboard was already fried... anyways so then he asked to use his HDD in my pc, so i reluctantly agreed on the condition that he not touch my hardware for any reason (he's damaged a few pieces of hardware - both his and ones jointly owned - by doing things that really shouldn't be done). so i figure the easiest solution would be to try and get some dual-booting thing happening, but that didn't work. in the process of trying to get his hdd to work on my pc, my setup which was working fine had a slight hiccup. my firewall app reset itself and i lost all my rules. URGH. that's the second time it's happened, for reasons i still don't understand, so i uninstalled that app in disgust. how silly is it to not be able to easily backup or export/import rulesets?
so then i downloaded a comparable product (long story about how the orginal parent company split in two and each 'child' continued development on the same base product but now independently growing etc - i was using one and thought i'd try the other). i'd actually briefly used the other one when i was setting up this current PC, cos i thought the first one had disappeared. it was slightly different and i refound the first so used that cos i was more familiar with it, plus the second one had problems with hibernating in xp. anyways i'm all geared up to give this other app a second go, so i installed it yesterday (now a later version from when i first tried it), and again problems with hibernation. stuff it i thought, not worth the hassle cos i love my hibernation! uninstall. but now my network is broken.... ??!!!
major ARGH!!! ok no lights on the network ports... let's try to suss things out methodically... check the router port with another pc and cable - yep all ok. check the cable using another pc - yep all good. so it's my pc... alright... double check that it's all enabled in bios (no reason this should have been affected, but just to be sure) and it's all good as far as i can see. next step windows... it says the connection is all enabled and that the LAN is connected, but still no lights. DHCP is not working cos the ip is wrong/invalid. so i try disabling and enabling, then rolling back the driver for the NIC, then uninstalling and reinstalling the device in xp. all no go. did everything the windows hardware troubleshooter suggested, not that i expected it to come up with any gems, and it didn't. even resorted to using system restore and that created a few more problems of its own so i had to do it a few times, but in the end even when i restored to a point when i knew that network was working it still didn't. grrrr...
so now it's getting late, and my router is flashing away with other siblings surfing the ADSL highway, and i'm sitting with a seemingly functioning NIC which just happens to not be working. it's like it's not turned on, yet the OS thinks it's A-OK. i'm almost ready to give up with disgust and frustration, and call it a night. i think i need the sleep anyway.
but, a thought strikes me about hibernation and how the NIC is setup to allow power management by the OS (ie winxp will shut down the NIC when it hibernates or goes into standby). what if... what if maybe when i had that other firewall installed and had those problems with hibernation, that stuffed something up? now, my pc had been shutdown, restarted and reset a good number of times this evening amongst all the installing, uninstalling and system restoring that's occurred to try to fix the NIC problem, but not once has it hibernated... hmm... ok let's give it a try. hibernation should be fine now cos i've system restored to a time prior to this present saga. hibernate. all good. restart and come out of hibernation... and let there be light(s on the NIC)! hooray! but i'm still not happy that it took so long to solve (the symptoms were just a bit too sketchy and misleading), nor that the problem happened in the first place.
but what can you do? learn from it what you can and move on...
speaking of moving on, change of topic - what i was going to write about in the first place. but the momentum has been lost... so i'm less motivated and inspired (not that it'd make for very motivating or inspiring reading anyway).
so, in brief... mooks seemed to do ok with her exam. we had dinner at the manor, a chinese restaurant nearby. we were going to go for the happy hour special, but found out that it needs a minimum of 4 people. so we had steamboat instead, which was pretty good but probably a bit on the expensive side. i'm still getting used to the concept of using two pairs of chopsticks when it comes to steamboating, so for the first 5 minutes was using the one pair for everything... not that it really bothers me, but i guess other people might find it odd. towards the end of dinner, a waiter came to pack up and remove the dishes. in the process he knocked over a bowl of dipping sauce, and spilled on mooks. she later complained that his first reaction was to say sorry, and wipe up the table... and then offer her napkins to wipe herself.
so we went back to my place where she borrowed a pair of my pants (which weren't going to go with her new shoes! =|) and left hers to soak in some stain remover, before we headed off to the movies.
pirates of the caribbean. keira knightley is rather pretty, hehe. johnny depp i felt had a interesting role, and played it well. overall a fairly light-weight but nevertheless entertaining movie with a few genuine laughs and chuckles along the way. plus it was free, cos mooks had free passes :)
a few things i didn't quite get though... [SPOILERS warning, stop reading now if this applies]
- was will's father also affected by the curse? he should have been, since he took part in the taking of the cursed treasure. so, that being the case, how could he die? ok maybe he didn't die and is still stuck at the bottom of the ocean somewhere, tied to a cannon...
- in the scene where jack finally shoots barbossa, barbossa falls and an apple rolls out of his had. does this mean he was holding an apple in his hand *all* this time?? ie while duelling with jack with the swords and all?? now i know that the apple had some meaning and significance to his character, but this seemed a bit too convenient.
- how come elizabeth's clothes dried so fast on their marooned island?? maybe she was wearing a different brand to when she fell into water the first time round... (okay so i didn't take that much notice of jack's clothes in either scene... but can you blame me?! :p)
- stupid monkey... i thought it had drowned already. but if it too can be cursed, does that mean it also paid its part by blood the first time round?
music::ginny again
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