There’s a church sign I’ve seen while driving around Oklahoma City not far from my house that has me puzzled. It says:

Those determined to walk with God become the target of the enemy

Hu? I’m not sure what they mean by that. What enemy? Why would they care if someone walks with God? The use of “determined” instead of something more vague, like “Those who walk…”.

The other God/religion related item that struck me as odd was a combination of two items. There is a car I see in my parking lot at work that has a vanity plate that reads:

WHATGOD

Cool, it’s someone who is open about questioning God here in religious crazy Oklahoma. That’s the first thing I thought. Until I saw the “God Bless America” sticker on their rear window. What exactly do those two things together mean? Are they just asking “What God should bless America?” Or is this some other meaning I am missing?

If someone has any insight as to what either of those mean, please enlighten me.

Ever since I got my laptop back in February, I’ve had issues off and on with it freezing and occasionally the BSOD. I figured it was my penance for using Vista. Last Saturday I had enough. After backing up all my music, pictures, & miscellaneous crap I wanted to save, I restored the laptop to its factory defaults. I reinstalled Firefox, Thunderbird, and iTunes, then began the tedious task of putting all my music back in place. After all of that, it blue screened! Then it decided it wasn’t going to boot into Windows at all. Even the repair feature didn’t know what the problem was. I ran CHKDSK, but it encountered an unknown error! I called HP at this point, since there was something obviously wrong with it beyond just crappy Vista. The guy had me run the BIOS hard drive diagnostic, and it froze on that!

So finally I got them to say something was wrong and that I needed it serviced. I had to wait for a call back from their hardware specialist. I waited until the next afternoon, then called back. I was supposed to get a call the next morning. After having to explain my issues a second time, they said someone would call back shortly. I waited until the next day, again, and demanded to talk to someone who could get me the information needed to get my laptop fixed. It was getting ridiculous. Finally, they took my information and said I’d be getting a box shipped to me so I could send it in. Wonderful.

The box came yesterday, and the laptop should be on its way today, next day shipping (no charge to me). I’ll be without it for 7 - 10 days, but when I get it back, there better be no issues.

And the call center? It was definitely in India. Each person I talked to had an Indian accent. They were very polite and patient, which was good. I know I wouldn’t want to work in that type of call center. I’ll take my hands on tech support and fix the problem, next ticket, thankyouverymuch.

I’ve already found a Linux distribution I want to try out on it. Mandriva Powerpack (formally Mandrake) looks pretty good. I gave the live CD a go, but it didn’t have support for my wireless built in with it. I hope it doesn’t take much to get it working. I’ve already found a how-to page for my specific laptop where they used a couple of tools to get their wireless working, and it doesn’t look too difficult. The only thing I’d need to change would be using my desktop if I needed to purchase something from iTunes, or to upload my Nike+ data from my Nano. I’d love to use eMusic, but I don’t buy enough to warrant a subscription. I really wish they had the option to buy singles or albums as needed instead.

And if I can’t get Mandriva running…well, I still have an XP disk laying around. Vista be damned.

The ironic part. Well, the week before this happened, I was doing a writing prompt for my write group that meets about every month. I was supposed to write a eulogy for my computer that up and died. Except I did it for my desktop, which is much older than my laptop. And my desktop is running just fine. (We put extra hard drives in it, and we’ll use it as a file/storage PC.) In fact, it’s doing nicely keeping me up with my email and my friend’s blogs. It does need cleaning up, and maybe reinstalling XP at some point, but for now, it’s my best computer friend.

Technorati tags: Linux, computer problems, defective by design, windows vista

It’s been a long time since I’ve updated, I know. I started my new job and boy I’ve been busy! I have a couple of posts I’m kicking around and I hope to get them out this weekend. So look for more of me then!