Neil Gaiman has an LJ

Neil Gaiman's journal! http://neilgaiman.com/journal_archives/2003_02_01_archive.asp

Not only is he a gorgeous angelic being, but he also has a sense of humor. Here is his tongue-in-cheek version of Gollum-Smeagol slash... Although he is not a reader of fanfiction, he recognizes it as a viable tool for honing one's writing skills - even if it goes something like this:

"Oh, the preciouss, I takes it my handsss and I rubs it and touchess it, gollum....no, Smeagol musst not touch the preciousss, the master said only he can touch the precioussss.... bad masster, he doess not know the precious like we does, no, gollum, and we wants it, we wants it hard in our handses, yesss..." etc etc)

My computer had babies again.

This is getting ridiculous. Every so often one of my computers will reproduce. I didn't even know it was expecting. Then Friday morning, I tried to boot it up and noticed a marked absense of boot-up capability. At first I thought my disk had crashed but then realized that whatever it was occurred before the disk came into play (uh oh).

So I started with the cheapest thing first. Checked the power cords. Checked the surge protector. Checked the video card (got a new one so I could check that) and tried another monitor. Checked the power supply. Checked the memory. Checked the disk even though that couldn't be it. Everything was working fine. (Uh Oh). Bought a cheap processor for 30 bucks (can you believe a 1.3 gig processor is now 30 bucks?) and popped it in the socket to see if that might be it. Nope. Even with the new processor it still didn't work.

UH OH.

How could a perfectly good motherboard go bad after only one year?? I LIKED that motherboard. Unlike the Possessed Motherboard of Horror, this was a nice piece of hardware that I enjoyed working with.

So anyway. By that time it was Sunday, and my computer was in serious labor. So we checked to see if there were any maternity wards (computer shows) available that day. Lo and behold. There was a computer show at the Equestrian Center (don't ask).

Off we went. There we bought the equivalent of a bare-bones for a reasonable price, brought it home, and put all my still good components into it. But of course, I just couldn't resist getting faster memory and an Athlon 2700... It was a computer show, woddya want.

The delivery was successful, thanks to Dr. rialian, and afterwards I redid Windows and its accompanying driver retinue.

The Mama is resting peacefully. It still needs a new board, hard disk, associated cabling, et. al., but already has memory, video card, processor, case/power supply all ready to go. The recovery process will be completed at the next computer show...