I don't think I've ever had a dream in which a famous personality was a character, not even after the time I met Alex Trebek in Germany. The celebrity in my dream was Betty White. I get all the luck. I think what triggered it was a sale at Game Stop.
Our older son said to me, "Hey, Dad, they're having a buy two, get one free sale. Any PS2 titles you're interested in?" I jumped on Amazon, and found an interesting title: "Naval Ops Warship Gunner". Hmm, a tactical ship to ship, highly rated title. When I was in high school, I used to play Fletcher Pratt's Naval Wargame with 1/700th and 1/2400th scale ships. Lots of fun, but pretty high brow. I'd always wanted a decent PC or console simulation, and this game looked like it might fit the bill. We drove out to the store and got the game, along with a few others. I had to work, so I didn't get to try it out for a few days. When I finally did, I went through the tutorial, which was a bit frustrating- it's got more stuff going on than Gran Turismo. At least in Gran Turismo your opponents don't shoot at you.
The tutorial seemed to take about half an hour, by which time some of my initial enthusiasm had waned. Still, I played a game, and predictably lost. It was not unexpected, so I will be back to play again.
That night, I went to sleep, and dreamed a few dreams in which I was travelling to various places to play video games. In one dream, I was sitting there, minding my own business, controller in hand when Betty White walks up to me with a controller in her hand. "I just can't land that 707 at LAX for anything" she says in the exasperated Betty White voice. "Show me," I offer, and she says, "Watch." So, the next thing I know she's piloting a 707 in some unidentified flying sim, except the viewpoint is outside the plane.
"There. Damn!" she says. Not only can she not land the plane, she has belly-flopped into the Pacific Ocean, about a mile from shore. End of dream. Wow.
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| PC test in the laundry room! |
The Christmas PC has a happy ending: the vendor sent another one out with a return shipping label. I tested it out, and everything was fine. I set it up at my wife's desk, get everything plugged in and... flashing cursor! Being the astute semi-I.T. guy that I am, I chose the path of least resistance, and unplugged the power to the external hard drive and rebooted. There ya go- PC booted right up. So something was wrong with the external HDD... maybe Western Digital will warranty it. But... when Windows is up and running, I plugged the power back in to the drive, and the PC recognized it. Back to square one. Power the drive down. Shut down the PC and reboot. Hit F10 until the config screen comes up and...
Whoever it was that configured the machine had the boot sequence as follows: ATAPI optical drive, USB, HDD. When I saw that, I just shook my head. I told our younger son about it, and he said, "Who does that, anyway?" I went back and tried the first PC- it works just fine, and has the same boot sequence.
Next time, I'll be back in the database!
To answer that question... That is the default on just about every PC I've worked on in the past several years. The thought is that the majority doesn't understand BIOS settings and will use removable media to recover their system at some point. Less phone calls to HP support this way. (See "Foamy the Squirrel" clip entitled "Tech Support" for added effect)
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