The long weekend from hell (PROTIP: MASSIVE QUANTITIES OF BITCHING FOLLOWS)

So, hope you guys had a good weekend. Me? Mine sucked. Really hardcore.

First off, keep in mind through all of this that I'm sick as hell. I saw a doctor about it today, and while I take his opinion with a grain of salt due to the involved conversation he had during the examination about the duck hunting trip that afternoon, he diagnosed me with a sinus infection. I have nothing against duck-hunters, but I do have something against people discussing personal matters on their cellphone when they should be doing their goddamned job.

Anyway, yeah. Symptoms include: super-headaches that NEVER. GO. AWAY., earaches, stuffy/runny nose, sneezing, hurting eyes, hurting joints, hurting fucking everything, lack of energy, chills, and loss of appetite. Surprisingly, though, no fever. I never have fevers, though.

Basically, through Saturday and Sunday, I was completely worthless. Tylenol/other painkillers did basically nothing, and staying warm was basically impossible. I'm a fat man, and thus have insulation against the cold. When I can't get warm, it's a big deal, and either everyone else around me has frostbite, or I'm hella sick.


Anyway, so, my laptop came in about Wednesday, and I was introduced to it Friday when I got home. Naturally, it came packaged with Vista. I'm pretty sure I'm with the majority when I say that I loathe Vista and much prefer XP. The first thing I did was make the restore disks, since HP wants everyone to use their built-in, likely worthless restore-from-harddrive function instead of a disk. It took 11 CDs.

After that was done, I tried to installed XP Pro. However, Vista has this thing where it protects itself from being overwritten once the OS is booted up. I don't know if this is specific to XP or just in general, but to get XP installed I had to boot from the CD. Which is no big deal, of course, except for the intimidating blue-screen-with-white-text that it involves. The install went smoothly, but I forgot the password for our internet service, so I couldn't really do anything. Had to download my anti-virus, then Firefox, then lots of other stuff. So I shut it down and went looking for the password. Eventually, thanks to Mom's excellent knowledge of her own filing system which confuses the hell out of me, she found it.

When I went to enter that in, the computer automatically booted up from the CD, rather than asking me like it should. Immediately, this sends waves of dread over me. Taking the disk out, I find that it just restarts over and over again and never loads the OS up. Shit.

So, out of the hope that maybe it was just set to boot from CD to the default somehow, I head into the BIOS to change the boot order so that it checks the harddrive first. Mom sees me doing this, with the intimidating BSOD layout and all. When I announce that the computer apparently can no longer find its harddrive, she decides that it's because of something I did in the BIOS or something. Note that she doesn't even know what the BIOS is or how to get to it.

Anyway, she's riding me to find some solution to this. I'm pretty convinced it's a hardware issue that came from the factory; an important connection isn't being made somewhere. However, that's not how she sees it.

My experience with laptops is pretty consistently negative, and I don't want one anymore. Fuck this shit; desktops are so much more stable that I'll just stick with them. However, we can't return the thing because it's been altered from the original settings. No problem; just boot from the restore CDs and put Vista back on. Except for the error that popped out of the FIRST. FUCKING. DISK.

Now, I'm pretty sure we can still exchange it. This is a hardware fuck-up, and even if it actually IS something that's my fault, we have a replacement policy that SHOULD cover this. But I've still gotta try to restore things to normal. So, on top of being sick, I've got Mom mad at me for something that I couldn't have possibly done.

Now, I'm probably making Mom look like some kind of psycho bitch who has no mercy for her sick son. This is most certainly not the case; she's been real good about taking care of me and all that. She just CANNOT accept that she knows next to nothing about computers and electronics. This is far from the first situation like this. A few times in the past she's gotten results due to dumb luck, however, so she's convinced she knows something when she doesn't. I don't claim to be an advanced computer user myself; I know software pretty well, but hardware escapes me for now. I can still firmly say that I know more about computers than her. Far more, really.



Plus, there's an AI assignment due tomorrow that I'm not only not done with, but am completely stuck on. Programmers know what I'm talking about here; your code is doing things and you can't see why. There is always an explanation, but you can't find it without some guidance. Had I not been bed-ridden most of the weekend, I could have consulted with my professor by now and hopefully figured things out. Were I not ever-so-slightly medicine-addled at the moment, I might be able to figure this out myself. However, for now, I'm sitting on results that I have no idea how to debug, and no professor to talk to, and it's due tomorrow. It was assigned two weeks ago, so I doubt I'll recieve any mercy regarding late penalties.


What a wonderful way to start the school-year. If it's gonna keep going like this, someone shoot me now.