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Entry tags:
weekend
Friday night's service was a so-called "adult b'nei mitzvah" service. (Boy, do I hate that term.) Six members of the congregation who'd never had bar/bat-mitzvah ceremonies led the service and read Torah. I participated in this last time around (two years ago) and it was pretty neat. This group did a good job. Tom, the person I studied with at the Shabbaton, did really well; his Hebrew is close to flawless (and was the best of the bunch).
Tom has apparently been telling people that I helped him a lot in understanding the portion. (I draw this conclusion based on the number of random people who approached me about it.) He's giving me too much credit. In one specific area I don't want credit, either: I disagreed somewhat with the spin of his drash (commentary/mini-sermon). It was well-done; I just disagreed with it.
Saturday was a local SCA event.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rani23 cooked a wonderful feast, and there was plenty for vegetarians to eat. The day was hot and humid; fortunately, the hall was air-conditioned. The choir performed and I think we did quite well; I was especially pleased with how "Halleluyah Halleli", the Rossi piece, came out.
The computer saga continues. Everyone local remember this name: A2Z Computers. Do not do business with them. Willie warned me about their business practices, but after Dani had called them for the initial repair. That was unfortunate. This meant that we were in a position to discover their technical deficiencies.
They "repaired" my desktop machine, and when we got it home it had all sorts of problems. (I wrote about this earlier.) Dani took it back to them, and they called an hour later to say "works for us". They eventually agreed to run some sort of diagnostic and to leave it running for a while. (I had asked whether it was overheating. I think they ended up ignoring that question.) They called the next day and said it was fine. Dani went to pick it up and this time made them demonstrate that it was fine. They booted, he used the file browser to move a file or two, and it did in fact seem to be ok. So he brought it home Friday.
Saturday night I connected it and everything was fine for about five minutes. Then I started getting the random application errors and blue screens again. (At least it didn't claim to have any virii this time.) Our best guess was that my copy of Netscape (the application I'd been running when this started) was perhaps trashed, and I decided to reinstall in the morning.
Sunday morning, the machine (which had been up all night) wouldn't respond to mouse clicks. (It tracked movement.) I rebooted (control-alt-del), and immediately got an application error from Explorer. I killed that process and that killed Windows; I guess Windows runs Explorer as part of the OS. (I thought it was complaining about a leftover running app from the previous session or something.) There was no graceful way to reboot (mouse and keyboard were being ignored at this point), so I had to power-cycle.
When it booted that time, it complained about the previous restart and dumped me into "safe mode". I rebooted again from that and was able to boot normally. But again, the errors began immediately. I tried moving icons on the desktop (as "safe mode" had trashed the layout); after two or three I got a blue screen and Windows spontaneously restarted. This happened a few times. Finally, I just shut down the machine.
The only thing I can correlate the errrors with is uptime, and even that is shaky. How would I test whether the fan is operating correctly?
The machine I ordered a week ago should be here any day now. Good; it looks like my current desktop machine is dead and the people who took quite a bit of money to fix it are going to screw us over on that.
Meanwhile, Dani's machine died Sunday. Looks like a hard-drive failure. He took it to CompUSA for diagnosis, so he'll know whether to buy a new hard drive or a new machine.
Last night we decided that we needed to distract ourselves by watching technology go wrong for other people, so we went to see Minority Report.
Tom has apparently been telling people that I helped him a lot in understanding the portion. (I draw this conclusion based on the number of random people who approached me about it.) He's giving me too much credit. In one specific area I don't want credit, either: I disagreed somewhat with the spin of his drash (commentary/mini-sermon). It was well-done; I just disagreed with it.
Saturday was a local SCA event.
rani23 cooked a wonderful feast, and there was plenty for vegetarians to eat. The day was hot and humid; fortunately, the hall was air-conditioned. The choir performed and I think we did quite well; I was especially pleased with how "Halleluyah Halleli", the Rossi piece, came out.The computer saga continues. Everyone local remember this name: A2Z Computers. Do not do business with them. Willie warned me about their business practices, but after Dani had called them for the initial repair. That was unfortunate. This meant that we were in a position to discover their technical deficiencies.
They "repaired" my desktop machine, and when we got it home it had all sorts of problems. (I wrote about this earlier.) Dani took it back to them, and they called an hour later to say "works for us". They eventually agreed to run some sort of diagnostic and to leave it running for a while. (I had asked whether it was overheating. I think they ended up ignoring that question.) They called the next day and said it was fine. Dani went to pick it up and this time made them demonstrate that it was fine. They booted, he used the file browser to move a file or two, and it did in fact seem to be ok. So he brought it home Friday.
Saturday night I connected it and everything was fine for about five minutes. Then I started getting the random application errors and blue screens again. (At least it didn't claim to have any virii this time.) Our best guess was that my copy of Netscape (the application I'd been running when this started) was perhaps trashed, and I decided to reinstall in the morning.
Sunday morning, the machine (which had been up all night) wouldn't respond to mouse clicks. (It tracked movement.) I rebooted (control-alt-del), and immediately got an application error from Explorer. I killed that process and that killed Windows; I guess Windows runs Explorer as part of the OS. (I thought it was complaining about a leftover running app from the previous session or something.) There was no graceful way to reboot (mouse and keyboard were being ignored at this point), so I had to power-cycle.
When it booted that time, it complained about the previous restart and dumped me into "safe mode". I rebooted again from that and was able to boot normally. But again, the errors began immediately. I tried moving icons on the desktop (as "safe mode" had trashed the layout); after two or three I got a blue screen and Windows spontaneously restarted. This happened a few times. Finally, I just shut down the machine.
The only thing I can correlate the errrors with is uptime, and even that is shaky. How would I test whether the fan is operating correctly?
The machine I ordered a week ago should be here any day now. Good; it looks like my current desktop machine is dead and the people who took quite a bit of money to fix it are going to screw us over on that.
Meanwhile, Dani's machine died Sunday. Looks like a hard-drive failure. He took it to CompUSA for diagnosis, so he'll know whether to buy a new hard drive or a new machine.
Last night we decided that we needed to distract ourselves by watching technology go wrong for other people, so we went to see Minority Report.