MrsBrown's philosophy of life and stuff

No more posts lamenting the death of my laptop. It has died its last and I now have a shiny new one.

I've bitten the bullet, spent money I don't have and bought a brand new laptop.

(Written last night, when the internet died)

Here's my first post from my new computer.

Not such a new computer, but it's as fast and easy as a new one should be.

I've decided to use linux for as much of my computer based stuff as I can.

Of course I've slightly damaged my old windows partition, so I can only have it read only, but that's ok, I'll have fun working out what to do about it.

When I get home from work I turn on my computer.

About 10-15minutes later, I can start to access the internet.

In that 10-15minutes, I can

• successfully ping the router address


• successfully look at stuff on a network computer via windows explorer.

I can't:

• go to the router address (ie 192.168.0.1) via a web browser (I've tried three)


• surf


• check my email


• login with my LJ client

What's going on?

Today's achievement: Persuading no.3 son that his attitude to blood tests was something he could use his brain to control, not his adrenalin rush. It required the application of time (we went to the pathologist twice) and a hefty bribe - when he has his next blood test in 6 weeks time I will buy him $140 worth of hard drive for his computer. He's going to spend some of his own money and get a 200G drive.

Z has heard a lot about blood tests from his father, who has a mild phobia about it and was VERY upset at the idea of someone taking blood out of him (he says he's fine with people putting stuff in). When we first went in, he sat down and chatted calmly with the pathologist, but when the needle was about to go in he freaked and insisted we leave. We stayed for about 30min, trying to persuade him and talking about the great vein he had, and how little time it would take. Finally we just had to leave.

Then I suggested the hard drive. He checked it out online, and thought about it, and agreed quite quickly. We printed out the specs and took them with us so he could look at them while the needle was going in. Ultimately, he watched the whole procedure and was much happier that the next pathologist seemed just as nervous about taking blood out of him as he was of having it taken out. He's been high as a kite all evening and much chirpier than usual. Probably worth most of a hard drive all by itself.

I'm not normally into bribery for children, but, I realised, I'm willing to pay a lot of money for him to have an education and music lessons etc. Being able to walk into a pathologists and have a blood test, without a drama is a valuable life skill - that I'm happy to pay for too. Z's uncle died of bowel cancer after ignoring and procrastinating about blood tests and doctor's visits for his ulcerative colitis. I'm glad to have an opportunity to do something about Z's attitude, while he's young enough to sit on my knee, and cry if he needs to.

Latest computer update - This process has been cursed with hardware fuckups and now I think it's the video card too. I replaced the cd drive on Sunday - it was giving me too many errors in the install process, but I now have linux installed on the machine. I just can't see it. As soon as I get out of X-window (I think it's called) the screen gets 2 or 3 vertical strips of multicoloured horizontal lines. I know linux is in there - but I can't see it and I can't adjust the display settings and I can't get a text console and ... IT JUST DOESN"T WORK!!!!!!!

If it weren't for my natural persistance, just plodding along, a bit each night, I'd have given up by now. Tomorrow, I get mr_bassman to play with the hardware and tell me it's all working.