Captain Yang's Crusade - 3 x 2

[Darius]

2166 to Flubber.

[Flubber]

to johnd

[johndmuller]

2166 to DataJack Darius.

Sorry for the reload:

Plenipot (shouting): "Who the hell's in charge of the computers around here? If we keep taking too much time and having these crashes and needing reloads and giving out such lame excuses, it's going to ruin our @%$&#!ing diplomatic @%$&#!ing credibility!!! Besides, you know, they might just figure out that it's the interceptor crash, and no one's supposed to know (bangs on the table) that we've rediscovered Air Power yet."
2ndDeputyUnderAssistantPlenipot (anxiously): "But Sir, we understand that it happened while they were trying to save the intermediate records - the one in between the two negotiating cycles - they told me that was a very conservative approach, and you did after all 'suggest', as I recall after the last crash, that they follow the most conservative approaches. It must have been a hardware or software problem - please don't make me 'talk' to any more computer people, they all run away from me whenever they see me now as it is.".
Plenipot: "Tell that to the cheesecake you had for lunch, you need the exercise, and I don't want to hear any more whining or 'But Sirs'. We've been sweet talking and negotiating all morning with that @&^$-#^@ing Messenger, I just want to yell at someone; what time is Happy Hour anyway? Get me the *!!#*@#er who bought that hardware and software, and tell those people working down in the basement that we got from Yang, that we're sending someone down for them to practice up on."
Deputy... (perspiring visibly): "But Sir, that would be your nephew RD; don't you remember how your wife carried on when you enlisted him in the Spartan Foreign Legion after he gave the Drone's military budget to Santi by mistake . . . and then how you got that disease from the um, er . . . because your wife wouldn't, you know, . . . and then how you told me to find some nice cushy job for RD so your wife would let you come back home . . . ? . . . And Sir, there's no Happy Hour anymore, you cancelled it after that time (smirking) that your sister-in-law got pregnant, remember?"
Plenipot (cooly): "Well, isn't it fun to relive all that. I guess that means that you'll be the one going downstairs to keep that appointment with Yang's men for dear old RD then, doesn't it? . . . (chuckles) . . ."
Deputy... (ashen faced, with sqeaking voice): "But Sir, . . . "
Plenipot (continuing to chuckle as he removes a bottle from the desk drawer): ". . . Oh, and one more thing before you go downstairs for your 'exercise'; have them send in the Angel spy we just captured, you know, that really hot one, I want to interrogate her myself before we send her back.'

[Flubber]

2167 to johnd

[johndmuller]

2167 to DataJack Darius.

See you'all next week. Sorry for the delay.

[Flubber]

back to johnd

The delay is fine with me as this is a long weekend here and we are headed out of town for 2 days anyway

[johndmuller]

2168 to DataJack Darius.

[Darius]

2169 to Flubber.

[Flubber]

2169 back to johnd

[johndmuller]

2169 to DataJack Darius.

[Darius]

2170 to Flubber.

[Flubber]

2170 to johnd

Turned inside of 20 minutes !!!

[johndmuller]

2170 to DJ Darius.

Sorry for the delay, I had some hardware problems and stumbled along with a different disk drive reasonably well, but when I got my regular drive working again, I had to reconcile two different pairs of notes - it was possibly more trouble than it had been when playing the turns just after the problem with my several weeks old backup note files. I'm almost back to normal now, should be able to play at a faster rate. It may also turn out that the part I fried was what was causing me to get periodic blue screen disk problems and/or sudden reboots; the old part seemed to be occasionally losing its power connection and the new one fits much more tightly. (I'm sure you are both really interested in this commentary - If I hadn't just discovered Centauri Hardware, I wouldn't be able to bore you so well .)

[Darius]

What part was it, John? I've started getting blue screens occasionally on my laptop when shutting down.

[johndmuller]

I'd be surprised if you had one of these, Darius, especially on a laptop. It's a "converter board" that merges a 68 pin SCSI cable, a PC's 4 pin power connector and a few misc. jumper settings (like the SCSI ID) into an 80 pin "SCA" connector (I got a good deal on the SCA SCSI drive - which I try to remember whenever I have to deal with these problems and related technical crapola).

I have a similar blue screen on shutdown problem which I think is related to using Adaptec "DirectCD" software when running Win2K - that's the driver/file system that deals with Adaptec's "Direct" CD-RW format (looks like a standard disk drive in the Win Explorer). It works fine on NT4 systems, even lets you read a Direct CD-RW on a regular CD drive; however, while it works OK with Win2K, it seems to prevent a normal shutdown from occuring giving either a blue screen or (if the reboot on error is on) booting up again after a pause to write an inscrutable crash log file (have to use the power switch to shut down). I suppose they have a newer driver, but since this software came free with the CDRW drive, they may want to charge me for an upgrade to Win2K or XP (apparently I'm a cheap SOB ).

I've also had problems shutting down with Win98 where the Internet Connection Sharing feature is installed - with this one, it just goes into that Windows is shutting down screen display and stays that way until you kill the power, then does a disk check when you restart it. Sometimes, however, it shuts down OK, generally if you had a pretty short session.

I've looked into Microsoft's knowledge base trying to get a clue on these problems and one of them said something about shutdown problems if you had a lot of network connections (IIRC, I think they were talking about mapped network drives), but that didn't seem to apply unless it doesn't take many to have a "lot".

I remember a laptop I inherited once at work that had a nice red button to turn it on, but could only be turned fully off if you knew the magic combination of keys to hold down which was of course explained only in the long-gone manual. I think it was a month or two before I found a similar enough manual or internet reference so I could turn it off.