Friday, October 19, 2001
Dentist appointment at the office of Mat Kiisk. I didn't like having to wait a month between my pre-cleaning appointment and my cleaning appointment. When I arrived at the office, I was told by a man who called himself Jacques that he was a dentist who was helping Dr. Kiisk out with hygienist cleanings. He rushed through cleaning my teeth. For example, during the polishing stage, some of my teeth were polished for less than 0.1 seconds. At work today I fixed Debrah's computer, which had been blue-screening at random with growing frequency. My fix was to install Windows 2000 over Windows NT 4.0 SP6a. I used PartitionMagic first to convert the C drive from FAT to NTSF, then rearranged the space on the disk to make a backup copy of the original C drive partition. During the Windows 2000 install, I got an error message which said, "Setup could not locate the Windows installation you want to upgrade." This is covered in the Microsoft KnowledgeBase (Q242066), so I found it quickly. After making a Windows NT 4.0 boot floppy and handcrafting my own boot.ini file, I quickly resolved that problem. The installation continued, and then at the completion of the installation, another error: "KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED." Ack! I found the answer on smartcomputing.com: the problem has to do with ATA/66 UDMA 4 hard drives and the question of motherboard support for it. However, it seemed from the answer that all you needed to do was hit the Reset button and all would be well. This turned out to be true for me. After all this, I realized my PartitionMagic boot disks and my NT4 Emergency Rescue Disk were of no help, so they went back into the "reformat and relabel" box. I stayed late helping Chris with a corrupted installation of Eudora. The problem was that his inbox had completely disappeared—no messages when yesterday he had plenty. I fixed it in less than 15 minutes: restored his Inbox from yesterday over the network using Retrospect, and reinstalled Eudora to a new folder. Also freed space on the C drive from about 23 MB to 300 MB. Got a burrito at Azteca. Brian and Kelly weren't home, and Patrick was at Lambda Literary Festival, so I went home and packed some boxes for our move. I listen to a message on the answering machine. It's Tina, and the message is a few days old—we've been too busy to even check our messages. Patrick listened to the message last night and he told me he thought Tina said she bought a Lexus. That sounded a little weird to me, since I know she loves her brand new VW New Beetle. Turns out she bought a Lexmark all-in-one scanner, fax, printer machine. It's not Patrick's fault—our answering machine has terrible sound quality. I laughed when I figured it out.