Wheels within Wheels

Well, the laptop can use an external monitor. Not that I’d doubted it, I’d just never done it. Since I work with bringing up new hardware, I’ve grown to expect things not to work until they’ve been tested.

Unfortunately, the laptop won’t boot anymore. Apparently, lsass.exe has decided that the user accounts aren’t set up properly. Since I never set up any, this is disturbing. What’s worse is that the damned thing won’t respond to F8 to boot into Safe Mode, which is the prescribed method of dealing with the problem. The only keys it will respond to during the boot are F2, to get into the BIOS configuration, and F12, to boot from LAN.

Maybe a new laptop is closer than I’d thought.

Yesterday was a pretty good day. Company picnic at the zoo, went to the Titanic artifacts exhibit at the museum, had a nice light dinner (tapas and beer at Tastes). Then, I packed up my laptop in preparation for working today, and didn’t notice the translucent cap from a thumb drive sitting on it before I closed the lid.

I now have about half of the display still working. I guess that means I start saving my pennies again. I suspect I’ll end up going for a Mac laptop – I replaced my WinXP desktop with an iMac some time ago, so it would be nice to be able use common software on both. I could pick up a copy of Parallels Desktop so that I could run the WinXP programs I require, but that’s for another day.

Today, I need to see how well the laptop runs with an external monitor. I know someone who’s been running a laptop with a totally dead display for a couple of years using an external monitor; I may not be in a real rush to replace mine yet.

My previous post just stretched the mold a bit. My blog is mostly a “Distraction” blog, to use the taxonomy I found at Roger van Oech’s (my blog is all about “shiny things,” to use my daughter’s terminology.

That last post was more an amalgam of the other three categories, and I’m of two minds about that. On the one hand, I tend to be the shy and retiring type who tries to keep a fair amount of privacy (a friend lets me use her grocery store affinity card, so that we can both hide our purchasing preferences). On the other hand, I’ve been working for years on being less shy and retiring. Perhaps this is just another indicator of progress?