What a Day!

Before I launch into the vagaries of today, I want to take a moment to welcome and thank all those who have signed on to contribute to this blog. This includes the newest contributor to the blog, but a familiar name with the show: Welcome and thanks Peter!

Speaking of newcomers, Nate, a.k.a. Giant One jumped "write in" with his story of his friend's rent-to-own saga, If you haven't read it yet, scroll down and take a look. Well done, Nate!

Now on to my day. It had an inauspicious start as I pulled myself out of bed shortly before 6 am, literally threw stuff in my bags and spent the day on a long drive down to Los Angeles. The further south we got the warmer we got. Then we got into the what is now a 24 hour rush hour on the freeway near downtown LA. Between the heat, that I'm not currently acclimated to, the fumes, and the lack of sleep, I arrived at the hotel with a raging headache. Everything combined to make my head pound, but mostly, it was the exhaust fumes.

But... but... but the hotel had broadband so all was well and relaxation and recreation online were close at hand, right?

Oh no. Life is never that simple. There was no wireless, but not to worry, I had an Ethernet card along and several hunks of cat5. As I booted the computer I realized that all was not well. Windows was asking for a driver for my Ethernet adapter. I furiously searched through my CD case. No, I hadn't thrown the CD with the driver in. Then I anxiously searched the hard drive, knowing that I had very few files archived there. Oh, of course I had the driver for the wireless adapter, but of course, I didn't have the Ethernet driver. The driver was only a download away, but with no way to connect the Ethernet, no Internet. Oy!

So I returned to look through my CD case hoping something would turn up. And there I saw it -- an old Knoppix CD. It was old but it was one I knew worked on this computer and one that worked perfectly with the Ethernet adapter. So I booted and the real fun began.

The only trouble I had getting on the Internet using Knoppix was that I had to call the hotel front desk for a password in order to use the broadband service in the hotel. But I was soon connected and at the Netgear Web site downloading the driver. If you've never used it, Knoppix runs from CD in virtual memory. I figured writing the file to my NTFS partition would be a problem, but I had plugged in my flash drive and had no trouble reading it. Since that is formatted in FAT, no prob writing the driver file to that, right? Linux does FAT just fine, right? Wrong! Knoppix would not write the file to the USB flash drive.

So I tried the hard drive and no surprise there -- no go. Then I found a floppy rattling around my computer bag. Rattling for a little too long -- wouldn't read, wouldn't format. I flung the worthless floppy on the floor. By now my freeway fume induced headache was pounding. I was so very near and yet so completely far from having the driver.

This time I rebooted with my USB CD burner plugged in and turned on (this machine is on the older side and the built in CD is not a burner). On more trip through the CD case yielded my only fresh CD-R. I had one chance to get this right. I had burned a CD on this burner from this copy of Knoppix before and was guardedly hopeful. So I downloaded the file again (the first download had been on a virtual disk in RAM and lost when the computer was rebooted). Then I burned the whole 350k file to a 700 MB CD. What a waste, but I had to do what I had to do. Knoppix reported the burn was successful and I rebooted hopefully.

When I rebooted to Windows, it dutifully asked me for the missing driver. Or course it was zipped on the CD. I forgot that, pointed the add hardware dialog to the CD and everything hung. I finally had to shut down my machine, and no, it wasn't graceful. So now had I managed to trash everything? Happily no. I rebooted, unzipped the driver, and installed the new hardware.

So the moral? There are several. Don't accidently delete your Ethernet driver. Don't pack in a hurry when you are asleep. If you carry a floppy, carry several that aren't 10 year old former AOL disks. Carry a CD with all your essential drivers, especially the ones you need to get on the Internet to download more drivers. It never hurts to ask Tux for help. And last of all, when driving on a freeway in LA, don't breathe the air.