I Feel Like The Edgecrusher

January 9th, 2009  by Blaine Garrett

The band Fear Factory had a song a few years back called "Edgecrusher". So the story goes, they ran into a street performer while on tour in japan who called himself the "Edgecrusher". His schtick was that you would give him electronic devices and he would destroy them - I assume as a bit of performace art. I fell like that should be my new title lately... I feel like more electronics have failed in my presence over the last month than in all my previous years on this planet. About a year ago, the dvd drive on my work laptop died and I have been making due since, which wasn't a big deal until recently. Around Thanksgiving, I bought an 1TB external hard drive for backups. For a while now, my work laptop has been acting pretty funny as well - freezing up, etc. So once my harddrive arrived, I backed up all my pictures and such onto the new drive and reformatted. However, reinstalling OSx proved to be difficult since my DVD drive was broken. I did manage to use my roommate's macbook and do some magic trick with firewire to use her laptop as an external dvd drive. However, copying 2 CDs worth of install data over firewire took about 8 hours of a sleepless night one night. yuck. Shortly after I was back on my feet, my new external harddrive started beeping at me an wasn't recognized by any computer. I took the drive out of the enclosure and the sound was indeed coming from the drive, which meant the drive was dead. Awesome. There went all my photos and docs over the last 6 months... Somewhere in there my phone died too. Or rather, I couldn't hear anything out of the speaker nor could anyone hear me. I went  a few days without phone before trying my ear piece, which magically allowed me to hear people again. Yay for the fail phone. I'm broke and can't afford a new phone right now, so I am running around with the scratched up POS with a missing battery cover and a janky ear piece. awesome. Last weekend the pure unadulterated suckage continued. Before I got my job over 2 years ago, I bought a new PC laptop. Since then I have basically used my work laptop as my primary laptop and so the PC laptop has hardly been used. However, last weekend while Joe, Charles, and I were painting, I hooked it up to the PA system to play cds through. Everything sounded really skippy. At first I thought it was just scratched disks. However, then we tried netradio... and the netradio was skipping. After looking into it a bit, I discovered a SYSTEM IDLE PROCESS that was sucking up 98% of the CPU regardless of closing programs, restarting the computer, etc. Mind you, I was supposed to be working on paintings during this time - not trying to play on the computer. YARG. So, we just managed and listened to a bunch of skipping netradio. neat. Then there were the last three days.,. Wednesday, my internet failed as it normally does. However, this time, I was midupload of some work - Specifically, a javascript file that was part of a massive code update I have been working on for a month. Once the internet came back up, the file on the server was empty. I scoured the local temp files for Transmit to find the code... nada. After cursing a lot and a quite a few cigarettes, I was luckily able to get back to before the loss in 2 days... i.e. today. Shortly, after I got back to before the loss and was quite proud of how fast I managed to get it done, my computer started getting warm... and slow... and then finally locked up. This is not abnormal, even after reinstalling OSX. However, this time, the computer wouldn't reboot and was reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaal hot. Nothing I tried made a difference. So, I texted my boss who said to go to the Apple Store to diagnose it. After dealing with the usual Apple Store condecending pricks who try to explain how a computer works, I manage to run into my friend Adrian who I used to do music stuff with back in the day. He is a tech there now and was able to sneak me in. So, I will find out what is wrong within 24 hours. They think it is the harddrive. If so, that means the harddrive and the dvd drive are broken as well as the LCD fading horribly, a usb port not working, and it just generally being scratched and tired out. Granted it is 2+ years old and I use it 10+ per day every day. So, my hope is that work will spring for a new MacbookPro depending on the cost of fixing my old one. Eitherway, maybe I shouldn't really be using anything with moving parts this weekend until I overcome this whole "edgercrusher" avatar I have apparently adopted. blarg.

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