I wrote before about my car stereo giving up the ghost on me. Actually, it didn't give up the ghost on me; it's working well within its parameters. The issue with it is that it seems to believe that it's stolen.

I set the Theftloc code on it around Thanksgiving of 2001 because I'd be leaving my car on a city of Houston parking lot at Intercontinental Airport. I figured having a nice flashing light on my stereo would help ensure that it would still be there when I came back to it after visiting Marilynn in California.

Sure enough, when I got back my car was unmolested, but I didn't think much about the code until my car's battery died last month. Once it was replaced, the stereo was locked up tight. Now it's not operable until I have the car on for an hour, and I get a few more tries at the code. Not Cool™ - when do I have occasion to leave the car on for an hour?

This is just a minor annoyance, though - I found the dealer system for unlocking them online, so I don't have to remember my code, just get their response code for my stereo's challenge code by calling a 1-800 number. Pretty sweet, but a pain regardless.

That's just the half of it. Apparently my computer decided that suicide was the only way out.

Last Tuesday I helped a friend at work pack a U-Haul to move into their new home. Once I got home I was wired and couldn't sleep, so I decided to come into the computer room and geek for a while.

About 3:30 AM I decided that it would be fun to try to update the BIOS on my old Abit BH6.

Never mind that I had the "FU" release, which was the second oldest; never mind that I was tired; never mind that I was doing this in some odd, ill-hatched plan to use this old slot-1 motherboard with a slocket adaptor and a 100 MHz FSB Pentium III to get some life out of my machine. I was going to update this anyway.

I loaded the "SS" release BIOS up on a disk with the flash writing utility for Award BIOSes, booted to DOS, and downloaded my old BIOS into a file just in case. I then proceeded to flash the BIOS.

Or rather, I tried. A lot of the blocks failed. Miserably. What's worse, the old BIOS wouldn't go back. Oh, shit, I thought to myself. You are so screwed.

At a loss for what to do, I rebooted and hoped for the best.

The drive light came on solid, stayed on... and the screen went black. No signal. No functional BIOS. No nothing.

Normally at times like this I'd panic. I mean, when your computer doesn't boot, it's brown trousers time.

I was calm. I went to Marilynn's computer and started surfing, and found out that (a) I can buy a new BIOS from Abit for cheap, and (b) that's about my only recourse if I have one motherboard. If I had two, I could boot the good one, take its flash chip out, put the ruined one in and then reflash it, but luck would have it that I only have one BH6.

What'd I end up doing? Buying computer components I didn't really want. I got an Epox motherboard (been rock stable), a GeForce 2 GTS video card (sweet for Photoshop and my old games I love) and a Pentium III 1.2 GHz. Not the system I wanted, but I already had a half-gig of PC133 memory, and the way memory prices have gone up...

Even better? Today at work around 4:30, it was announced on the on the public address system that the elevators were having problems, so you should take the stairs. I didn't leave until 5:35, so I forgot all about this.

I got in the elevator after waiting about ten minutes for one (this should have been my first clue), and there was already somebody on it. We stopped at two more floors, letting a person on at each floor. "I remembered the announcement on the overhead," the one lady said, "but I heard the 'ding' so I decided to try the elevator."

This was a mistake.

The elevator continued down to the first floor, and upon reaching the first floor there was an interminable pause, followed by the lights flickering and the lights in the panel doing a 120 beats-per-minute dance that you normally only see at a rave. After that, the lights came back up (slowly) and the car sat there.

We looked at each other, and the lady closest to the panel hit door open. Once again the flickering dance happened, and then we were plunged into darkness.

I was shocked nobody panicked. Everybody was talking about finding the phone until somebody groped around and found the fire button. The alarm went off, the lights came on, and we rose to the second floor somewhat... suddenly. (Why aren't the elevators that fast all the time?)

After hitting the button again, the elevator sank to the first floor, and the dance of the lights happened again. A small man standing in front of me hit the door open button and they did, indeed, slide open just as the lights went out again. We strolled out into the lobby where the fire alarm was going off (thanks to us in the elevator, I suspect).

We just decided to leave and not bother to explain. Anyway, at 4:30 they acted like they knew.

Today it's our anniversary. One year ago we met. What's odd is that we're still getting used to each other in so many ways, and in a lot of ways we're totally domesticated. I'm not sure if she's upset that I'm sitting here on the computer (I applied for some jobs at other hospital systems - I suspect there is an entry about that coming soon, possibly tomorrow - I really have to get out of my current work situation; I was also buying a pentacle necklace to wear), or if she was for real that she wants to celebrate the anniversary of our meeting in Las Vegas in September.

I am still in creative mode - work is taking some of it out of me, but I really feel the need to work on things. My designs in my mind for the website are waning; I take a book to write them down at work, but I never have time. When I get home by the time we spend some time together and eat it's fairly late.

There has to be a way...

restlessmind