So, I had this plan today: Swim, Clean, Fix car, Lunch, Shower, Work.
It was slightly modifyable by when the DVD+-R/W/RW/Z/Q/R/an/do/m/L/e/tte/r/s drive arrived, to include ‘fit new drive’.
I’ve done:
Swim – went well apart from the large mouthful of chlorinated pool water I managed to swallow. Did two very quick lengths of crawling, and a bit of slower crawl and a great huge wodge of breast stroke (ah, now we work out why I like swimming). Nikki dropped me off on the way home, and I stopped at Sainsburys, collecting mucho salado for lunch(o).
Clean – I’ve washed the entire bathroom; the shower cube, the toilet, the sink, the floor all now clean. Go me. I’ve cleaned the kitchen surfaces; loaded, switched on, and unloaded the dishwasher; cleaned the fronts of some cupboards, the oven doors, the hob, swept and washed the floor, cleaned the sink (even under the drainer), sorted the recycling, washed the outside of the bin. So, that’s all good.
The DVD drive arrived.
So I unpacked it, checked it over, and then very carefully put it down and went out to fix the car.
Since the car’s had it’s new engine I’ve had electrical problems. Permanent annoying problems with charging (incidentally, Explorer has just crashed and appears not to want to quit, fucking windows). So, today I set to cleaning all the connectors. You may remember a while back I cleaned the fuse box? Well, today I repeated the process for every connector I could get to / get apart.
(Pause for a multitude of resets followed by…oh, I’ll explain in a moment).
It hasn’t worked. The thing still won’t, or more accurately will just-and-barely charge the battery with the lights on. I have cleaned earths, remade connections, soldered together joints which (Charlie Ware’s Morris Minor Centre) had made just by twisting wires together; all in the hope that the cause was dropped volts across a bad connection.
But as far as I can tell it’s not. The fucking thing won’t charge. I’ve asked on the MMOC, and I have this horrible feeling that this might be alternator number 200 (well, okay, 3) on its way out. I’ve got the original ital one, which is a bit rough, but might be servicable. I could cry though. It’s also suprisingly cold outside when you’re (essentially) just standing around.
So, anyway, having discovered that I’ve not succeeded (I wish I’d never changed that fucking engine now; the electrics were *perfect* before I did that), I made myself some lunch and stuck the DVD drive in.
This has proven, also, to be less than successful. I’ve yet to get more than a couple of minutes without a crash. It’s taken me a full hour of reboots, and I’m currently waiting for fucking Pinnacle InstantCD to go. Nero wants the install disk before it’ll try to recognise the drive (like I can remember where that is! – I think I’m going to have to have a look though).
Hopefully, extracting Pinnacle (which I only just installed, by the way, it wanted almost 1 gig for it’s fucking software!) will mean that I can make my system stay running. I might, at some point, get to try burning a DVD :-/
So, my day’s started to go rather pants, really. Which is a bit pants.
