Compocalypse '09: The Vomiting

[cleolinda]

Written yesterday while every service on the internets was down, fnarr:

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce... Camille.




Camille is a lady, and she will kick your ass like one with her 6GB of RAM and her 650GB storage capacity (7200 rpm). She has every kind of CD/DVD drive except a Blu-Ray (nobody's perfect), a built-in wireless LAN (802.11b/g/n), and an Intel® Pentium® processor E5300 with 800MHz frontside bus, 2MB L2 cache and 2.6GHz processor speed. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds pretty badass. And all for a cool $509.

(What? Quantum of Solace was on the top of my DVD pile.)

I am not, however, writing this on Camille right now. Camille is still chilling upstairs in her box. Let me explain why:

1. My mother lost her car keys and pretty much her fool mind this morning and charged around tearing the house apart for two hours and finally, after using her spare set to run some errands, found them IN THE RECYCLING BIN.

2. The Geek Squad totally lied to us misrepresented the cost of recovering and tranferring data--if it's over 10GB (OF COURSE IT'S OVER 10GB, YOU MORONS, IT'S MY ENTIRE HARD DRIVE), it's an extra $50.

3. I don't know what I've pinched in my back/hip, but it's killing me. Dragging Betsy 2.0 down the stairs didn't help it either. And then we decided not to transfer the data off her right now anyway, so it was all for nothing.

4. I don't know what's wrong with my grandmother's plumbing exactly, except that it's going to involve $2000 and a backhoe.

5. Twitter was hit by a DDOS attack (Facebook and LJ apparently were as well) and it's not like I get to spend a whole lot of time on this computer downstairs, so this is really putting a crimp in my style.

6. The cat threw up on my bed.

7. THE FUCKING CAT THREW UP ON MY FUCKING BED, ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME. On my BRAND NEW comforter. (Okay, it's a year old, but I have kept that thing PRISTINE, so IT COUNTS.) And then the hworf soaked through both the sheets and through the mattress cover. And also got on the quilt, except that I didn't notice this until I was curled up in it trying to get my hip to knock the whole pain thing off like an 80-year-old woman and then CAT BARF CAT BARF NOOOOOO.

8. God, I hope that was cat barf.

I am pretty sure that if I were to try to plug Camille in right now, she would burst into flame. So... we're not so much with the doing of that today. Better luck tomorrow.


Tomorrow now being today. But not yet set up. *crosses fingers*

Comments

[caitlen.livejournal.com]

I hope it was cat barf too. Also - best wishes with you and Camille. I absolutely adore my new Asus (eeePC, so a wee bit tinier than Camille!).

[robling-t.livejournal.com]

4. I don't know what's wrong with my grandmother's plumbing exactly, except that it's going to involve $2000 and a backhoe.

Having just gone through a Girlybits Crisis, let's just say that the mention of "plumbing" momentarily sent me to a place that was... very odd, in this context. {shudder}

[alliancesjr.livejournal.com]

Were this the case, I would really hope she meant a metaphorical backhoe.

That, or it's most strangely timed innuendo ever.

[thecolourclear.livejournal.com]

This was hilarious. I started laughing at six and started really laughing at 8.

I hope your day is far better today.

[scornedsaint.livejournal.com]

found them IN THE RECYCLING BIN.

Hee. Keys and cell phones always end up migrating to the weirdest places. One of my friends found her phone in the fridge once. At least your mom found her keys before the recycling was picked up.

And congratulations on your bamf-tastic Camille!

[fryboy.livejournal.com]

I don't think your cat was kidding you :(

[angelene.livejournal.com]

I am pretty sure that if I were to try to plug Camille in right now, she would burst into flame.

.............. yeah, that's... possible. °_°

I'm still (and will keep on) crossing my fingers for you here.

while every service on the internets was down, fnarr

Didn't you once mention how you felt that Terrible Things Could Happen while you're for whatever reason absent from the Internets? Well... um.... yeah. ;)

YES, I AM kidding on this last account. I don't believe that is actually the case, and you shouldn't either! ;)

[salamandersam.livejournal.com]

Imagine an entire week like your day yesterday, and that was me last week. I hope that today goes a hell of a lot better for you.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Oh God, I am so sorry, man.

[angelene.livejournal.com]

Forgot to ask: why "Camille"?

ETA= argh, ok. I was thinking "Although I feel I should know", and then I was like "Ah, right... Camille is the girl's name in QoS" and then I was like *FACEPALM*.

I'm slow.

[alliancesjr.livejournal.com]

Camille is a gorgeous name. She is one sexy lady.

I'm so sorry about your bed. I hope it can be washed out relatively easily. Dayna's cat once peed all down my back (I didn't notice because she peed all over the couch and I was sitting on the floor with my back to the couch) and I had to borrow her husband's shirt and they washed my shirt. It was pretty horrible. But it washed out.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Eh, it rinsed off the comforter pretty well; it was more the extreme annoyance of having to strip every last thread off that bed and wash everything and glare at the cat a lot.

[7tree-hugger.livejournal.com]

Lol cat barf. At least it isn't almost (very nearly but not quite) stepping in dead bird in your bare feet whilst still half asleep on a sunday morning.

er... yus. delurking to wonder if you might be interested in cidercupcakes's 2009 run-off knockout election thingie: Vote for your favourite female character etc (http://cidercupcakes.livejournal.com/266990.html).

Wish darn work let us see pictures, I wanted to see what Camille looked like. Best of luck with her.

super long comment about plumbing is super long, and all about plumbing

[twigsandgrace.livejournal.com]

If your grandmothers plumbing is costing that much, and requires the use of a backhoe, its most likely tree roots in the stormwater and/or drainage pipework (stormwater = pipework from gutter to downpipe to street kerb outlet; drainage = pipework from toilets, showers, basins etc to septic tanks, holding pits, trenches and/or city sewerage). They get in the joins between the pipes, and freak out and grow like crazy because of all the water, cracking pipes as they get bigger, and clogging them so nothing gets past and you get water bubbling up in the yard, or worse, raw sewerage. If you catch the problem early, you can use (what we call in Australia) an electric eel, which is a big coil of steel that spins and rips out the tree roots in a big rope like this:



Catch the problem too late, and the tree root blockage gets so heavy that the eel can't get in there to grab purchase, and the pipework needs to be excavated, cut out and replaced with new.

There are stop gap measures to prevent having to dig up the garden etc and replacing all the pipework, like running the eel through the pipework every three to six months to clear the new roots that -will- grow back, but leaving it that long means more tree roots will make more penetrations, and more pipework will be damaged, which means more pipework to be excavated and replaced.

Still, $2000US sounds really expensive (that's about double in Australian, i think - or once and half again... something like that), so the pipework under the slab of the house (or cellar - they're popular in the US, or so the TV leads me to believe) or a vast majority of the stormwater/drainage pipework may be blocked and/or damaged. I hope your grandmother shopped around for some prices, because there are shonky plumbers out there who, in these desperate times, will jack prices up like crazy on quotes just to cover their overheads.

Also, and this is from personal and professional experience, getting big jobs like that quoted more often than not ends up adding close to 10-20% to the total bill, and while it's scary to say 'Just repair it, please', you can save money by getting the work done and receiving an invoice for work done, rather than work quoted.

Also also, your grandmother might consider having some trees/plants removed to prevent this from happening in the future, and also having a plumber come around once a year or so to check all the pipework with a drainage camera to make sure the problem hasn't occurred again.

/end super long plumbing comment.

[skybreak-seeker.livejournal.com]

And people ask me why I don't like cats.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

I like other people's cats. That I don't have to take care of. Children, too - same reason.

[mokeyhokey.livejournal.com]

Do you know anybody with an external drive enclosure (perhaps Sister Girl's boyfriend? He sounds pretty computer savvy)? If you do you can just pop Betsy 2.0's drive in one of those and hook it up to Camille to get everything off there that you haven't already. That is pretty much what the Geek Squad would do, except now you would be doing it for free.

Fingers crossed for Camille's safe launching later today!

[shadefell.livejournal.com]

If animal effluvia stories will make you feel any better, I had a dog (black lab) who used to vomit in my shoes. Inside them. In the shoes. Which I didn't notice until I was running around getting dressed for school in the morning and then splortch, I had toes full of dog puke.

I now check my shoes before putting them on. People who don't know me often ask if I grew up in Nevada or something. Am I checking for scorpions? Spiders? No. It's dog vomit. I'm looking for dog vomit. I don't even own a dog any more.

[ctina.livejournal.com]

2. The Geek Squad totally lied to us misrepresented the cost of recovering and tranferring data--if it's over 10GB (OF COURSE IT'S OVER 10GB, YOU MORONS, IT'S MY ENTIRE HARD DRIVE), it's an extra $50.

When my mom's harddrive died--with all her pictures, music and what have you on it--she took it to Best Buy to purchase a new computer and transfer the data off the old one. They were all, "Sure, we can do that. It'll be easy." Then they called the house a few hours later and said, "So, that data transfer? It'll be $5000. Want us to go ahead and do that?"
The answer was a resounding, "HELL TO THE NO."

I'm glad to see that your cost had fewer zeroes, though that still sucks regardless.

6. The cat threw up on my bed.

Omg, mine too! It's like, when cats of the world get sick--they get organized.

[leila82.livejournal.com]

$5000?? Good lord, how could it cost that much to transfer data?

[lisa-zj.livejournal.com]

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce... Camille

Love the name. And she is beautiful. Good luck with the awakening. :)

But Cleo......Lordy, girl. You need a vacation on a secluded tropical island or something. Sheesh!

Wait.... I need one of those vacations, sans kids and husband.

[pandorasblog]

Oh lord. I hate it when they choose your bed to barf on. And I hate it when they make the barf unnoticable until it is too late. That your cat has managed to combine both is sucky in the extreme, and I think you are wise not to plug Camille in.

[wumbawoman.livejournal.com]

So it is possible for the internetz to go down. We thought we were just having problems on our end.

Here's to a better day!

[fineprnt.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize that it wasn't just me until my friends started teasing me about "Twitter withdrawals" - then I Googled that business and was like, "IT'S FACEBOOK, TOO, EAT IT."

[piccgirl.livejournal.com]

Awww. I hope things get better. Here's to hoping that Camille (love the name, btw) does not indeed burst into flame when you plug her in.

And I hope your hip/back feels better. As one with semi-chronic knee pain (long story, I sorta fell off a stage) I understand the body issues. And I have cats. So yeah. I hope it was cat barf too.

Mojo to you for a better day.

[trinastar.livejournal.com]

So on top of all the chaos that happened yesterday, John Hughes passed away. I don't have the link handy and I found out from another coworker while setting up for an 80's special thingus.

Love the new computer, and as far as the cat barf thing goes. At least it was easy to clean, the bed thing wasn't nice (but usually when sick, cats don't do nice.)

[editornia.livejournal.com]

When I got down to reading 7, I misread this: On my BRAND NEW comforter. as "On my BRAND NEW computer." and nearly had a heart attack. Then I re-read it and calmed down ever so slightly.

My heart is still racing at umpteen miles per hour.

I hope you have better luck soon! *HUG*

[katharhino.livejournal.com]

Your computer is amazing, and I say that even as a Mac person. *admires*

I was so mad yesterday morning – LJ wouldn't load, and then I tried to update my FB status whining about LJ and THAT wouldn't load either. I was reduced to pouting over gmail chat with my sister.

I am really sorry about the cat barf. And to think I used to imagine cats were cleaner animals than dogs... O_O

[mumford519.livejournal.com]

You have like no luck. When it rains it pours, eh?

Yes, I know that was not helpful at all. Sorry.

[cherrymaryberry.livejournal.com]

Pissed of Luna is pissed off.

Oh Sailor Moon...memories!!

[cherrysakura5.livejournal.com]

Well I don't have a cat (wish I did) but I do have two very loud very screechy parakeets and one of them vomited on the drinking fountain. I...I think it's in love with the drinking fountain. I really have no idea but he seems fine to me maybe it's because they are the parakeets that never die. lol

Anyway Camille is a beautiful name for a computer. I wasn't very creative with naming but my computer has fainted on me so many times and ends up with amnesia every time so it's current name is Blake, one of my favorite actresses is Blake Lively. But my computer will always be little Camryn. ^_^

[meroceres.livejournal.com]

Oh my God. *gasp*
She's... beautiful.
Hello, Camille. How you doin'?

[fxchip.livejournal.com]