Sometime during this coming week, I'll be signing off for a few days (probably the better part of the week). I'm sending my computer in for repairs, and I don't have another one, so I've got to wait until I get mine back to do any more development or anything else (including posting on here).
If anybody has anything they want me to do, now's the time to ask 
You are here
Leaving for a few days
February 12, 2010 - 11:47pm
#1
Leaving for a few days
Visit the Community page
Join our forums
Subscribe to our email newsletter
Subscribe with RSS
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on LinkedIn
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Mastodon
Follow us on BlueSky
I thought you were a DIY person... I guess I was wrong.
Anyways, you could go to the library.
Insert original signature here with Greasemonkey Script.
perhaps its under warranty. I wouldn't work on my own computer if it was under warranty.
On the other hand, most aren't. Course, fixing computers is now my day job . . . .
Too many lonely hearts in the real world
Too many bridges you can burn
Too many tables you can't turn
Don't wanna live my life in the real world
which is why I won't do it myself.
Besides, I'm not happy with the complexity of the job (changing a broken touchpad button) - it involves taking almost the entire laptop apart, and I'm not particularly comfortable going that far yet.
btw, I can't just go to the library - their lockdown policy is ugly (NO executables except a preset whitelist - even Task Manager is blocked - and they have software enforcing that), and I'd be stuck using IE with no security at all.
"The question I would like to know, is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. All we know about it is that the Answer is Forty-two, which is a little aggravating."
Warranty == Ship
No Warranty == Damn the torpedoes.
Its very freeing when you realize that you really can't make something worse, so why not make it better
Ouch.
Too many lonely hearts in the real world
Too many bridges you can burn
Too many tables you can't turn
Don't wanna live my life in the real world
My thoughts exactly. (Although I regularly, almost daily, threaten to wreck the computer by running malware on it, I do have reimaging disks)
Eh, depends on the fix at hand. In my case, the problem is a broken touchpad button - not that big a deal - and fixing it involves taking much of the laptop apart. Risk vs. reward isn't favorable.
Yeah.
I took an hour trying to subvert their system (with the librarian's permission, of course); the best I could do was take advantage of a "vulnerability" in IE to browse the filesystem (Windows Explorer is impossible to access, so I typed the file address in the IE address bar - yes, the system is that locked down) and run Windows Calc. Notepad = no go, cmd = no go, every confounded thing on my flash drive = no go. I tried renaming SpeQ Mathematics (a calculator) to iexplore.exe, to see if it could get by; no suck luck. After one hour, my big "gain" was running Windows Calc. woot.
And I don't believe I mentioned that they've got an IE bug that locks up the entire IE interface when you open a new tab. It takes 10-20 seconds from the time you open a new tab to the time you can use it, which is absolutely maddening since I'm a multitab guy.
I've tried getting them to install Firefox, and I'm pretty sure they want to, but the sad reality is they can't. (They're restricted by the real world: they've got to cater to the "lowest common denominator", which happens to be IE users)
So, does anybody have anything they'd like me to do before I go? (I'm already planning to do Opera if I can get permission in time)
"The question I would like to know, is the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. All we know about it is that the Answer is Forty-two, which is a little aggravating."
Yeah, generally with a laptop I'll take advantage of the warranty, since taking one apart (except to upgrade the RAM or harddrive--which I do myself--since there's dedicated access panels for those) tends to be pretty risky. For a desktop, not so much. With desktops, once you've seen one you've basically seen them all (it's just a matter of figuring out how the case comes apart), so I know what I'm doing inside a desktop chassis. And I generally trust myself to work on the machine more than I'll trust the repair guys. I'm weird that way.