Los Cuatro Ojos

What A Day!

I am officially paranoid.

The day after I posted my Rant on Earthlink… My main hard drive goes belly up… We’re talking corrupted. Badly.  None of my utilities worked… Disk Utility… DiskWarrior… Nothing.   I couldn’t even restore with Time Machine.  We’re talking panic here… Meltdown, Pee-your-pants, Have-a-drink, Scream-at-the-kids, Woe-is-me Meltdown.

And of course my modem was still dropping the connection every 10 minutes.

And in the middle of all this… The AirCon on my house takes a vacation.  And it’s 104º outside.

In my heat-stroked panic… I began to believe that “They” were out to get me… Wasn’t sure exactly who “They” were… But “They” got me…. I just knew it had something to do with those all-seeing, all-controlling folks sitting at their consoles at Earthlink Central.  Yeah… That’s it… They fried my hard drive and caused my AC to quit… Horrors!.. See what happens when you try to stick it to “The Man”?!?

OK.. OK… Nevermind.

After a couple of cold ones and a shot of Okinawan Sake… It was easier to focus on the “real deal”…

Well… it’s like this… In my attempts to find out whether or not I could track down the ISP problem I’ve been dealing with for a few days… I decided to scan my entire system with Norton AV… The whole 1.4 terabytes.  But I forgot to pay attention to a couple of small details…  And I paid dearly.

Mac OS X Leopard has this cool back-up dealie called Time Machine that auto backs up every hour… Sucks up tons of processor and RAM power when it’s doing it’s thing though…. Usually no big fuss… Unless you’re running something else that sucks up tons of processor power and RAM.

Like Norton AntiVirus.

Simple operation… Run manual full system scan… Turn off Time Machine.

Oops.

So I owe a sort of backhanded apology to Earthlink…

Even though you guys can’t get your stuff together and fix an access issue… I was wrong to think (and cuss) all those dire curses your way about my hard drive.  And the facts that the hit count for LCO went up by 4000 visitors the day of my Rant and that I had to use the Rant plus family connections to get a simple response from someone who could replace my modem doesn’t excuse the curses upon your children, grandchildren and mothers that I so sincerely called down upon your houses. 

Please accept my sincere apologies… I have burnt an incense in your collective name.

As to the Air Conditioning…

In my wild-eyed panic over not being able to get any work done and having to shut down more than half of the electronic heat producers cluttering up the old Rat’s Nest…. I kind of mentally glossed over the fact that I had actually called in the AC company myself because I wasn’t happy with the output of the unit.  Never mind that the house was at a comfortable 74º even though  it was 102º outside… Plus there was a little water dripping down the side of the furnace housing.

So the AC guys sent over Coleman… One of their top techs who I’ve known for years.  And Coleman finds that the cooling coil assembly needs cleaning… Hey!… I’ve got 4 cats and 5 dogs… There’s bound to be some fur that gets past the filter!  No big whoop.

But the cracked drain pan? That’s a problem.  Can’t put the coil back in with a cracked pan.  And do the AC coil makers stock spare plastic drain pans?… Noooo!  A $40 piece of plastic bolted to the bottom of an $1100 copper and aluminum cooling unit can cause you to have to buy a whole new unit?!?!

“Order a new pan.” growls I… “Not gonna get here til Monday.” sez Coleman… ” Gonna be a hot weekend.”  And away he goes… Leaving me to shut off computers and printers and breaking out fans… “Mama and Auntie and the kids are gonna freak.” Thinks I.

You know those stages of grief people talk about?.. Anger, Bargaining, Denial, Acceptance, blah, blah… Well, somehow… during the anger stage… I managed to rationalize that Earthlink just had to have engineered this too. (See what excessive heat and stress can do to an otherwise rational mind?)

Soooo… Now, I’ve had a nap and wrestled my hard drive back to normal (my connection still sucks though!) and I’m sitting at the only computer that’s on in this house that normally has at least 5 running…  at 3:50am and it’s 90º with 80% humidity and the fan isn’t helping at all… The weather report calls for high humidity and at least 104º until next week and my new modem won’t get here til the AC is back up on Tuesday.

But I’ve got my hard drive back and once again Einstein is proved correct… All things are relative.