Bloody hell! What an annoying day it’s been today.
I went to collect my camera from Nikon – at long last it had been
repaired. It seemed to be in working order – took a photo at the shop.
All seemed well in photo la-la-land.
I get home and fiddled with some of the non-default settings. Bang!
Horrible glitches appear all over the damned LCD screen. Where there is
meant to be a cross-hair on the screen, there is instead a randomly
arranged assortment of yellow pixels obscuring most of the picture.
AAAAAAAAAuuuuiirhgrgr4frBG!
Goes away when I change back to the normal settings, but this is clearly
unacceptable.
But wait… there’s more!
I phone them back to voice my displeasure and speak to the technician.
He seems puzzled about the problem. He seems even more puzzled when I
mention that I’d claimed from insurance for the repair. ‘What? But it
should’ve been a write-off. You should have told us it was for insurance
purposes,’ he says.
AAAAAUTHRHGHRHAUAAUURHGHEEHERHGH! I DID!!! Why the frigging hell
couldn’t the stupid moron at the counter tell the technicians this is
something I am having trouble figuring out.
AAUAUUGUUUGFGHSEHfuklEFJ;HLORJSWNvgaqeruig;CEJY8cetr!!@@!@#$!
~^(@#!@#$(*O$%@*$%GFHJG
But wait! If you buy now, we’ll give you PC troubles! [Warning: Geek
person content]
After phoning them my joy increased not at all when I couldn’t run
openoffice – it wouldn’t start up at all, or just hung there. Tried a
couple of things, and then finally decided to reinstall it – except my
root partition complained. Device read-only. Huh? Even logined in as
root I couldn’t write any files. Started getting all kind of exciting
ext3 write errors. Yippee yay dandy doodah!
I mean..
AAAAUURGdfjkghdfgiohdsiohsfiughgradUIGH:UIDHF:SUOEHFUI:H!!!!
Reboot into Gentoo LiveCD, run fsck. All happy now. Except I’m really
getting sick of attaching stuff to /lost+found. It’s happened 3 times in
the last month or so.
The Waffle Group 
Neil. A request from a humble wafflist. Could you please set up your BlogSpot comments page a la Gareth’s, i.e. that it does not launch a separate pop-up window whenever I want to add a comment?
Pop-ups chew up system resources and make me want to shoot things, both of which are rather bad.
Much obliged,
-q-
Re: the actual contents of the blog, I am distressed to hear of your ongoing camera woes with the dysfunctional crew of muppets at Nikon. Much hope that resolution comes swift and satisfying.
Re: your root partition woes, hmm sounds rather ominous… [cue Jaws music]. Is it a new-ish hard drive? Might be time to consider replacing it if not.
-q-
I’ll look into the pop-up thing.
Hard drive is as new as my PC. It’s just one partition that’s causing trouble, so I might have to format it and re-install things.
I’ll wait until the partition does a catastrophic failure thing on me though.