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Just one of those days

I knew for a while now that my laptop was in trouble; it was taking more time to do things, constantly running out of disk space, and more crashes than I'd have liked (not as much as Vista, but more than my main PC!) I was waiting for a bit of free time before I rebuilt it, but it became a necessity today, as mosr of Monday was spent working very slowly while I was waiting for my laptop to catch up. The first serious warning sign however, was when I was attempting to back up the laptop's contents to a portable hard-drive, and it kept continually struggling with 'unreadable' files. Now, all of these 'bad' files were inconsequential, but the fact that I could not even back them up was ringing some major alarm bells. Final confirmation of my worst fears came when I attempted to rebuild the machine; the hard-drive was knackered. Not one of the Linux distros I tried on it was even able to format the disk, let alone install an OS onto it. This alone took most of my morning up, for which I was thankful of having a desktop machine on which to do my actual work. As soon as I could, I headed to the nearest computer shop, realising only when I'd closed the door behind me that I'd locked myself out again!

I wasnt too hopeful that the shop would have a new drive in stock, as they never seem to have the thing I want whenever I go in; and they didn't. So, now I was locked out, hadn't managed to find a new drive, and it was raining.

Once I'd finally got back in, I rang the next nearest computer shop from the next town along. They had a drive in, it only cost £50, and it was much bigger than the initial drive I had in the laptop. A ½ hours walk to the next town in the drizzle and find out that the shop has moved since I'd last been in it. Fearing the worst, that it might not be in this town any longer. A quick call home to get the number of this place again (I don't like calling directory services from my mobile, as I like small phone bills!) and get told that it's moved to the other end of the town centre. Did I mention it was raining?

Finally, feeling like Indiana Jones with prize in hand, I make it halfway back through the town when the sky opens up even more. Feeling a little defeated, I decide that it might be best to take the bus back home, but feel quite robbed when I realise I'll be charged £2 for the privelage. Either I'm old, or, well, I'm probably just old.

Of course, if this was as bad as the day got, I wouldn't be so peeved, but while I was trying to sort out the laptop in the morning, I realised that a clients site had been hacked. The hack had not only affected their live site, but also the new site I was developing for them. Although I run Linux on all my machines now, I'm not adverse to the idea that any machine can be compromised. However, after checking the other sites I look after, and realising they were untouched, I relaxed slightly and set myself to the task of informing the client, fixing the problem, and trying to get their lazy hosting company to check out the issue, a task which they appeared loathe to take on. It seems they would prefer to bandy about security terms as arguments to my initial suspicions of how the site could have been hacked. My suspicions were confirmed once they did pull their fingers out and check the logs.

This very attitude it one of my pet peeves. It seems that the support departments of companies become more stupid the larger they get, preferring to rely on what seem to be untrained staff who read off of question sheets. No amount of explaining that I've gone through all these checks already will convince them that I know what I'm doing. 'No, I don't need to be told where the battery is kept', 'Yes, I do know the difference between memory and a disk drive', and 'What do you mean you won't support setting up the router because I'm not using Windows?'. These sorts of scenarios seem to occur all too often with me, I suspect I just attract the phone-based idiots.

So, now, having finally installed the OS, I need to get it all set up and put back all my files, programs and preferences again. This is probably the longest re-build I've ever done, but overall probably worth it. Incidentally, the fresh install of Fedora 10 (I'm not looking to 11 just yet, as 10 I feel is more stable just for being around longer) worked without a hitch, and I'm liking the new look for KDE4. Compiz is up and running, in the shortest time ever, and works just as well as it did on the old Suse installation.