Well I’m sure you all know about the tragedy right now in Haiti.  A 7.0 earthquake hit there on Tuesday, and there are a lot of people dead.  There are estimates of 100,000 to 500,000 which is just unreal.

I really don’t know what to say about it except it really sucks.  These are human beings, and their lives have just been taken away from them.  The people who have lived through it have most likely lost members of their family, their homes and so much more.

I’ve been on the internet for many years.  I’ve seen everything.  Goatse.  Two Girls, One Cup.  Cake Farts.  Guys getting their heads blown off.  Posts by Toptenguy on NPP.  All these horrible things - to the point where I’ve became desensitized to them.  Someone can send me a picture of - christ I don’t know - a kitten getting stomped on by high heels and I won’t bat an eyelid.

But this picture I saw today really got to me:

That is without a doubt one of the saddest and most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen.  I honestly don’t even know if that’s from Haiti - it’s being passed around the internet like crazy right now and no-one has said it isn’t from Haiti.  Regardless of whether it’s from Haiti or not, that’s the situation they are facing in Haiti right now.

Just sit back and think about the next week in your life.  Planning to eat out at all?  Going out for drinks?  Renting video games?  Buying DVDs? Going to hit the corner store and buy some junk food?  Picking up some weed to get stoned on the weekend?  Basically - planning on spending money on things that you don’t really need?

Put it off till the week after  Because Haiti needs it right now.  The International Red Cross is the best place to donate I believe, however if you go to any charity website you like/trust I am sure they have a special link for Haiti.

There are many worthy causes out there, but right now Haiti needs everything they can get.  Every little bit helps.

Well I finally got my new computer today, and everything has turned to hell since.  Wonderful.

I had everything backed up and prepared, so around 9pm tonight the process began of unhooking my old computer, and hooking up my new computer.  I opened it up, took out the packing stuff, had a quick glance around then hooked everything up.  That was a pain in the fucking ass as I can’t move my desk, but I finally managed to get it done.

I boot up, and I get an error that it can’t find a system disk.  I thought Windows 7 was meant to be pre-installed on it, so I was a bit concerned.  However I put in the Windows CD and booted up from that to do a fresh installation.  Well, that did not work out well at all.  Once it got to the part where I choose where to install it - I couldn’t.  The SSD wasn’t showing up, and I was unable to install it on the regular HD as its letter was X:, and Windows will only install on C:.

So I checked the BIOS and yep - not detecting the SSD.  Fuck.  I spend awhile googling, trying things and nada.  This was meant to have been tested before they sent it out too.  There’d been an issue with an Intel SSD Firmware update a few days ago which toasted a ton of SSDs.  The theory in my head was that after testing it all, they decided to give me the new firmware update but never tested afterwards and it had bricked it.

So after a couple of hours and no luck, I started thinking about what the problem could be.  It seems whenever something fucks up, I always forget the simple problems.  I look at what the bigger issues could be, rather than starting from step 1.  So after debating with myself, I start the chore of unhooking it to open it up - and sure enough, the SSD just wasn’t connected.  Yay!  So I connect it back up, and on we go…..

Or not.

The first issue was when I boot up, the monitors turn off.  Oh, wonderful.  Boot into safe mode right?  Well unfortunately another problem, which was it didn’t recognize my USB Keyboard.  Seriously.  In 2009. So fucking retarded.  So I go in the basement and dig out the PS/2 Keyboard, wipe the dust off and hook that up.  I get into safe mode, and it is set up to run the whole installation process.  Okay, no problem.  So I start that up, and it reboots itself once, then does some shit, then reboots itself again….

and I am back to the original problem with the monitors turning off.  I boot into safe mode and “setup is preparing your computer for first use” but OH WAIT Windows cannot complete installation in safe mode.

At this stage I have absolutely no clue how to fix this.  Yay for Windows 7!  It’s bad enough that I’ve been awake for pretty much the last 48 hours due to Mason being sick as all hell, now I have this wonderful stress to deal with.  Sigh.

I should really sit down and organize my e-mail.

You think?

There’s another 20 folders below that

I worked at a computer repair store for a year, and then did computer troubleshooting for people part-time for many years, usually visiting their homes to do work.  These were all pretty old people who knew shit about computers, or people with teenage sons, so it was always a disaster.  However it was relatively easy work - clean the fuck out of it with spybot & adaware, get rid of Norton/McAfee(which had expired subs anyway), throw on AVG and I was good to go.

I stopped doing that years ago, but I’m still the go to guy for my family and extended family.  They have a computer problem?  I’m the guy that fixes it.  I don’t particularly enjoy it, but meh, I know that most people know shit about computers, and they’d get raped if they went to the Geek Squad or whatever, so I’ll clean it up happily while watching some DVDs or whatever, and not bother charging them.  Good karma, innit?

But yeah - I’ve seen a lot of bad computers.  The worst was my sister in laws that I had to work on back in January.  I had to back everything up before reformatting - but it wouldn’t even copy/paste.  I had to boot into MS-DOS and do it manually, and it wouldn’t recognize my USB drive or key, so I had to install a fucking hard drive on there, and then copy everything to it.  To make matters worse, the hard drive was only 2 gigs(a real old one) and they had about 20 gigs of stuff, so yeah - I had to take it out, install it in another computer, move everything over etc - about 10 fucking times.

Brutal.  And easily the worst computer I have worked on.

Until tonight.

I have my brother in laws computer here to fix.  It’s been here for about a week, but I didn’t have time to do anything with it.  Finally I had a spare hour, and figured I’d clean up any spyware(I was told it was “slow”),  back everything up, and reformat.  Nice and easy.

Ummmmm…..no.

How can I best explain how bad this computer is fucked up.  Let’s see…

Have you ever ran Hijackthis before?  If you don’t know what it is - it basically lists all the processes running on your computer on startup etc.   The average user might have 20-30 entries running.  I’ve seen 40-50 for fucked up cases, and I think the highest I ever saw was about 70 or 80, and most of that was just Logitech shit.

So yeah.  20-30 average, 40-50 if a bit fucked up, 70-80 in extreme cases.

This Hijackthis log?  I think it warrants the return of a Scotsman trademark:

Over 8000.

Over 8000.

Over 8000.

I wish I was joking.  I really do.  But I am not.  I am not even close to joking.  This has over 8000 fucking entries in the hijackthis log.

Seriously.  If you gave me a computer and told me to fuck it up - I couldn’t even BEGIN to get over 8000 entries in the hijackthis log.  I am pretty sure if you went to Limewire, typed in “sex” and then downloaded any file that ended in .bat or .exe, you wouldn’t get even close to 8,000.

Just unbelievable.

Here’s the log for anyone curious.  I’m off to kill myself just now.

http://www.scotsmansblog.com/hijackthis.txt

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What a technologically advanced world we live in!