Adventures in computer failures

Well, that made for an interesting day. This morning, my mouse quit working. Now, the mouse on my desktop is cordless, so I just assumed that the batteries had gotten low enough that it was no longer connecting to the base. No biggie, I just swapped in some new batteries and... it still didn't work. Still not a big deal. It's an older mouse and I have the second mouse already hooked up to the computer and set up so I can use it with my left hand (yes, I'm a double-handed mouser... I'm ambidextrous and I like having a mouse available for whichever hand feels like using it). ( So, I proceeded with my day under the assumption that my mouse had died. )

Apparently, they were having some sort of "Buy $50 worth of stuff and get free tickets to Disneyland" Sale going on at Fry's (not really, but it was the best explanation I could come up with for the ridiculous line -- seriously, it went through the regular switchbacks and down the incredibly long aisle of impulse buys, then wrapped around outside that and up the center of the store o_O). We had found a hard drive to buy, but decided the wait was absolutely not worth it... especially since we had an older, working hard drive at home I could use in a pinch. So, we put the new one back and headed down into Tukwila to grab some dinner at Zoopa (where I broke down and indulged in a small bowl of their yummy clam chowder, despite the fact that my lungs were already not too happy. Thankfully, it didn't trigger an asthma attack this time, just a bit of a cough. Stupid allergies). After dinner we went back by Fry's and encountered no line this time (and had our other theory confirmed... that they'd sent home a bunch of cashiers and then had a huge rush of customers).

( We headed back home, triumphant from the kill, er, hard drive hunt. )

A bit more fiddling and the sad truth became clear. My motherboard is toast.

On the bright side, it means my original hard drive is probably just fine... and I do have a nice laptop I can use in the interim, although the keyboard might drive me nuts. It's not bad for short term use, but I love the one I have for my desktop (it uses the switch technology from the old IBM keyboards, which means it makes a lovely click-click-click when you type and has a very satisfying tactile response that makes it much easier to tell when you've hit the keys. It also is not USB, and I don't think we have an adapter that will let it work in a USB port at the moment). But I do have the laptop hooked up to my monitor, so I'm not having to deal with the smaller and lower screen.

Gah! Stupid motherboard. And looking back on it, I think it's been dying for awhile... there were all these little things that I just shrugged off as software hiccups that were very likely hardware related, after all.

Stupid "dieting" commercials

I have always had a bit of a bone to pick with so many of the commercials that are trying to play up the weight-loss capabilities of products, but lately it seems to be annoying me even more. Maybe because I've been losing weight and doing it the right way... keeping it nice and slow and nutritionally sound.

I just saw an ad for Special K cereal... a little girl had built a puffy snowman/woman and her mother came out wearing a long white coat with a scarf and gloves that looked similar to those worn by the snowman (which makes sense, duh, because the little girl probably swiped her mom's stuff to outfit her creation). And the little girl makes the comment "Mom! You look just like the snowman!" Mom, of course, looks at the snowman and doesn't see that they're dressed similarly... no, she looks at the snowman and sees that it's nice and rounded, so *obviously* her daughter meant that she was a bloated caricature of a person. I should point out that the actress playing mom is not even slightly overweight... at least not in this universe. She's actually quite thin. And yet the commercial then goes on to push Special K as a solution for quickly losing all that gross extra weight she so obviously has. o_O

Yoplait has a series of commercials with pretty much the same issue... with stick thin women lamenting their weight and extolling the virtues of Yoplait light yogurt in their plans to lose all that excess weight they don't have. And don't even get me started on Lean Cuisine, showing an office filled with spectrally thin women lamenting their need to diet and excoriating another equally thin co-worker because she doesn't appear to be dieting with them.

Grrrr.