The computer is still in a coma. It still won’t load. I tried uninstalling the memory and putting it back in and trying to start it with only one of the chips in case the other is bad. So either memory chips are bad, or there is something else wrong. If the something else wrong is what it is, the general consensus is to reinstall XP and format the system. Since, you know, The Thief’s Tale lives in there, that’s really not an option that I want to do. Like, at all.
-Went to Fry’s, got new memory, installed it even. I’m sad to say, that Lazarus is dead. Still no working. The computer that has come this far, the computer that stayed up late, that drew me into the world of my own programming, that was my constant companion throughout the last 2 years, the sixth team member, has passed on. It loads no longer, it will play no more games.
Let us take a moment of silence for the recently deceased.
But all is not lost friends, while death can be viewed as a end, it is also considered a beginning in some circles. Well, not mine generally, but I’m a rotten heretic. In any event, the data, the still warm heart (the hard drive really) can be transplanted into another and life can continue. I discovered at Fry’s that I can pull my old drive out, install it into a case and run it as an external hard drive, moving my data, my sweet delicious data, to the new laptop that hasn’t earned a name yet.
Star Frog Games is like Project Mayhem in that regard. In death, a laptop get’s a name. It’s name was Lazarus.
In the meantime I’ve got to figure out why the hell Blitz Plus refuses to run in the Vista environment. Yes, I could install XP on the new system, but I don’t want to. It’s full of apps that I do not have XP versions of. Bloody thing. I could also dual boot the system, but I’d rather not add stuff to it beyond it’s regular spec. I could, and in a desktop I would, but my new laptop still has new computer smell on it. I should be able to get Blitz to work correctly. I’ve sent an email to the Blitz people to see what the hell.
-No, there was no reason that “should” needed to be accented in that last section. But after “could” and “would” were, it seemed appropriate.
-Right, this kind of crap is what makes Indie gaming hardcore. Big developers don’t have production shut down for a week because a computer goes down. Developers with their fancy paychecks don’t worry about silly things like, “Burning Power Cords” or “Crashed Dev Stations” and nonsense like that. It frustrates. Well, I suppose that they also don’t get to play XBOX while code compiles (or maybe they do). I read an article in which Tim Schafer said that they had a toilet that would explode periodically when people up the block would flush. He didn’t tell new hires because, “Oh, and we have feces,” wasn’t a selling point. Yeah, I respect a man that makes Psychonauts while the basement is full of unspeakable Golgathan–esque horror.
It all makes me a little angry. All I want to do is work. That’s a basic want. I would like the ability to do this work without all the other, well, crap. I know that I’m asking a lot from the great beyond here, but really, can’t a man sit down and do some code? I think that there are enough things that can go wrong at any given moment. Functions that don’t work, bugs that don’t get squashed, people that don’t always have time, meetings to be scheduled, projects to be done and maybe, just maybe, a job or a venture capital advance or something. I do not need the hardware issues too.
Yet, you know, I’m still going on. I’m still standing.
DO YOU HEAR THAT UNIVERSE? I’M STILL HERE!
It’s going to take a lot more than a martyred laptop to get me to give up. Been through too much already. What else do you got?