the passionate ailurophile

So, Mike and I had a really nice weekend in Mystic, CT.  It was wicked cold, but in some ways, that’s good.  It means that stuph is much less crowded.  We had the Mystic Seaport Museum almost to ourselves.  It was nice to be able to go into more of the historic old buildings and not get stuck in a mob scene.  I am sure it will be MUCH more crowded when we go back in May for Mike’s birthday weekend.  That is, if the weather ever warms up again.  Sometimes, it seems that it’ll NEVER be warm out again!

We took advantage of the cold, non-touristy season, and visited the famous Mystic Pizza restaurant.  Yep, the one that the 1988 movie with Julia Roberts was based on.  I love that movie.  The outdoor scenes that show the restaurant in the movie ARE the actual restaurant, but they built a set to film the indoor scenes.  The inside doesn’t look much like it did in the movie.  Maybe it used to, but it’s been over 20 years, they have done renovations to expand the place.

Anyhoo, the Mystic pizza was actually very tasty.

We stayed at the Hampton Inn in Mystic, it was much better than the Super 8 in Groton where we had to stay when we went to that beer thing at the Seaport in October…there were no rooms anywhere else that were affordable.  That was the place that had POOP stains on the sheets.  Gross.  I wrote my review of this Hampton Inn HERE.
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The only sucky thing about the weekend is the fact that my netbook died, or so I thought.  I tried to boot it up on Sunday morning; it started to, then just got stuck on a black screen with a flashing cursor.

I had the owner’s manual with me, but that turned out to be useless.  Most of the instructions were for stuff that is no brainers, with the dumbed-down Linux operating system this thing has.  I mean, how to connect to the internet?  Just turn the thing on, and when it boots up, a little balloon pops up that says “wireless access points found”.  Click on balloon to see the list, click on the connection that is yours (it is not nice to steal wireless from your neighbors, even if they do blast their music at 3AM and let their kids play on your property), and poof!  You are now connected to the internet!  DUH.

No “Troubleshooting” chapter.  For that, it said to go to the ASUS website for support.  Dumbest idea ever, how can I go to the site when the damned computer won’t even boot up?  If it booted up and I got online, I’d not be needing to troubleshoot, now, would I?  FAIL.

It did have instructions for restoring the system to factory default that did not require the recovery disk that came with the thing.  I’d still have had to do that at home anyway, as the netbook has no CD/DVD drive.

So it said to turn the computer off, turn it back on again, and hold down the F9 key.  I did so, but nothing happened except that it typed tons of gobbledy-gook on the screen.

I decided to try to get online really quick downstairs at the hotel’s Business Center.  But both computers there were occupied by teen girls who were playing around on Twitter and Facebook.  There was a whole bunch of these teens in the hotel, there for some cheerleading competition, as we saw large groups of them in their team outfits.

So I gave up on that idea, deciding I’d just have to wait until we got home so I can use my desktop.  Damn, but I HATE it when kids use these public computers for games and Facebook for hours on end, when they are really supposed to be there for quick stuff, such as checking email.  This is why I bought a damned netbook in the first place, so I can just use the free wireless and play on Facebook, Twitter, or whatever for as long as I feel like, without inconveniencing other hotel guests.  As it was, it took me less than ten minutes to find what I needed to find, I would have printed it out to take back upstairs, and the computer would then be free for the next person.

Anyhoo, I was starting to be afraid that something was wrong with the internal solid state drive, and I’d have to get it replaced or repaired.  I paid just under $200 for the netbook, what if the repair ended up costing more than a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes?  Better to just buy a new netbook, which I wasn’t also thrilled with maybe having to do.

After we got home, I checked the ASUS website, it was even more useless than their owner’s manual.  Nothing in the support area about my problem.  Also, the site seems to have been written by people for whom English was a second language; this made me wonder if the phone tech support people were the same.  If I’d had to call them, I was in for it!

So I just went to Google and typed in asus 900a black screen, blinking cursor.  And this page had my answer.  You have to press F9 and the ON buttons AT THE SAME TIME.  Not, turn the thing and and THEN press and hold down F9, as the book said.  But it finally worked; it set the system back to factory settings.  Losing my bookmarks and stored passwords sucked, but at least the netbook was working again.  Seriously, though…the lack of that one little detail in the book made me almost want to pull my hair out!

The cause?  Some stupid update that the system forced me to download.  And it was a dumb update, too, for some stupid chat software that I’ve never used and never will.  So, I set the system to NOT automatically download anything, I will check manually for any updates.  otherwise, I’ll have to recover the thing over and over.  Now I need to figure out exactly how to get the chat thing, Skype, and other pre-loaded crap that I will never use, without removing anything I DO want.

I’m just happy the thing is working again now, no expensive repair or replacements!
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Finally, a weird thing has been happening to this blog since I installed the new theme.  You may have noticed that sometimes, it’s reverted back to the default Kubrick WordPress theme.  I didn’t do that, it did it by itself.  But my dashboard still says that I have the Atahualpa theme active.  Changing it to my old theme, then putting it back to Atahualpa worked.  After this happened a few times, I simply removed the Kubrick theme from my dash, as well as that REALLY ugly old default theme, the one with the green header.   We shall see what happens then.  If this theme still won’t “stick”, I’ll just have to revert to the previous one that I got sick of, until I can find another one that I like.

Anyone know why this was happening in the first place?