matthearn.com

I’ve never insisted that I was particularly bright. Which is why it shouldn’t come as a surprise to you that, up until this week, I had no serious backup setup for my computers at home. What changed this week, you ask?

Computer crash.

My wife’s achy old Dell B130 would only boot to the Blue Screen of Sadness, so I got it into diagnostic mode and did some tests; the hard drive failed like a fat kid in gym. It did at least START to load Windows before it would roll over and point its feet in the air, so there must be SOMETHING remaining on the drive. I deduced that with a little genius, I could get it back to life.

This did at least give me an opportunity to do a little shopping on Amazon. I ordered a new 80GB drive for HW’s laptop, thereby doubling her original capacity. Since I’m a moron and had never bothered to do proper backups, I also ordered a 1TB, that’s 1000GB, USB drive to start doing so. I also picked up a $15 laptop drive enclosure, so that I could put Sarah’s old drive in, and then plug in via USB to my Mac. If I could get the old drive to spin up, hopefully I’d be able to recover some data.

What I didn’t have, and couldn’t easily get, was any kind of “reinstall” CD. If the laptop had come with one, we couldn’t find it. There was a sticker on the bottom of the case with a product ID number for Windows XP Home, so I bugged my dad to lend me his Windows XP Home CD, and went to town. Inserting the new 80GB hard drive was a breeze; switch around a few screws and a protective plate from the old drive to the new, and plug that puppy in. Mounted the Windows CD, formatted the hard drive, and XP Home was on its way. It prompted for the product ID number from the sticker on the bottom of the lappy, and I typed it in.

“The CD Key which you entered is invalid.”

Huh? Maybe I mistyped it. It was annoying flipping the laptop over to get 5 digits of the code, and then flipping it back to type them in, so I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote the code down, then typed it in again.

“The CD Key which you entered is invalid.”

What the heuristic hell? I checked the key I’d written down against the sticker once more; it was accurate. What I had was a Windows XP Home License that didn’t work with the Windows XP Home CD I had. Good job, Microsoft; no wonder you’re laying off thousands. (In a related story, my Mac is awesome.) I later deduced that the code I had was valid if I could have found the original Dell installation CD, but since I don’t have one, I was SOL.

I did a little poking around warez sites to try and get a code, but none worked. Finally, through A Source, I was able to get a functioning code. It might not be ENTIRELY legal, but I reasoned that the laptop has a license for Windows XP Home, I’m trying to install Windows XP Home, it’s not my fault that Dell didn’t give me a CD to match the license key I had.

Finally got it installed and booted, only to discover that the CD came with only the barest drivers, none of which worked with the network cards in the lappy. So I had to waste a CD-R on the drivers I downloaded from Dell, but oh well. These are the prices we pay. (Along with, of course, the $200 for the various components I had to buy.)

Once that was done, I turned my attention to the old hard drive, which I screwed into the little enclosure I’d bought and connected to my Mac. It immediately recognized the drive, spun it up, and displayed all Sarah’s folders. Good times! I’ll just drag and drop. It copied around 6GB of data, and then EPIC FAIL!

Whatever was wrong with the drive (corruption, bad sectors, etc.) was preventing me from copying the entire thing. I decided I’d start with just getting the My Documents directories, so I dragged and dropped those: EPIC YAY!!!111!one

Final result: $200 spent, laptop disk capacity doubled, and 1TB backup drive purchased, which also gives me the ability to back up my entire gaming/recording desktop in the basement and rebuild it from scratch without all the spyware and viruses one gets from developing a truly mammoth collection of pornography illegal music jpegs of puppies.

Just a few collected ideas that jumbled around in my head this week:

• So far, President Obama has appointed political rivals to his cabinet; apologized when he screwed something up; closed a torture center; and worked major bipartisan magic with regards to the “economic stimulus package.” Is it just me, or has he accomplished more positive things in 16 days on the job than the last schmuck did in 8 years?
• Favorite Super Bowl commercial: Free Doritos!
• Speaking of the Super Bowl: why don’t the Eagles ever have Larry Fitzgerald/Santonio “San Antonio” Holmes-type receivers? The best we can come up with is a past-his-prime whiny TO for a season? Andy Reid needs to explain to me why, exactly, the Eagles run a pass-first, pass-second, pass-always offense and yet the best receiver on the team is the running back. I hate football.
• Speaking of TO: the greatest thing about him is that he will someday die, just like the rest of us. That will make the world a far better place.
• Speaking of sports: pitchers and catchers report in 10 days. Excited? You bet. I just peed a little! Okay, a lot.
• Always back up your computers. Do it. Get an external hard drive and back your stuff up. More info on this tomorrow.
• If any of you are local to northern DE, keep an eye out at the Boothwyn Farmer’s Market (aka the Bethel Mall) for when the little Cajun restaurant sells duck gumbo. It was fantastic. A little spice, mushrooms, a sauce so heavy it might have been used in early Manhattan Project experiments; I don’t think I ate for days after polishing off a quart of that bad boy. I’m pretty sure the container had an entire duck in it. I couldn’t even walk for a few hours, I just rolled myself around on an office chair and moaned occasionally.
• Had a lot of snow days lately. They are remarkably less fun if you have a job that requires you to show up anyway. I guess I’m saying, don’t grow up too fast, man. ::sob::

More tomorrow. Probably. Woo!

Apropos of nothing, here is a list of song titles you will never hear:

• “I Love You So Much (I Shat Myself)”
• “Bacon Me All Over”
• “Once, Twice, Three Times a Single Bit Memory Error”
• “I Heart Urinal Cake”
• “The Eva Braun Blues”
• “I Want To Taste Your Kidneys”
• “You Broke My Heart (And Also My Penis)”
• “Roll That Fattie In Flour”
• “I Stapled Our Hands Together”
• “That Pain In Your Heart Is Probably An Infarction”
• “I’m Bleeding Everywhere”
• “Drinkin’ Drano With Art Linkletter Again”
• “My Heart Belongs To Kissinger”
• “Our Love Is Like Fish Entrails”
• “Grease Me Up, Grandpa (That Dog Won’t Milk Itself)”
• “Upperdeckin’ The John For Jesus”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgWn7zbgxZ4&hl=en&fs=1]

Link day! It’s been a while, I’ve got the hot stuff to share.

• Like photography? Check out this portfolio commenting on how animals interact with the humans that roll all up in their shizzito. Note: the shots were staged with taxidermicalated critters, so don’t worry when you see, say, a little girl in a swimsuit confronting a massive bear.
• This is the greatest musical recording that has ever been made in the history of EVERYTHING. I cannot stop watching this.
• Like hallucinating? Can’t afford those expensive psychotropic drugs? Give this a try! I wonder where I can get a rubber hand.
• I don’t know what more you can ask for from the Internet when it provides this. While we’re a-YouTube-ing, here’s an oldie but goodie. Also: this is strangely enjoyable. And this is simply captivating.
• One more Youtube: Splashdown. Holy crap.
• Your dad is looking fantastic. And he’s been super busy, too! Great job by him.
• Thanks to PassiveAgressiveNotes.com we have fantastic finds such as this. Really? Rambo quotes? Fantastic.
• I’m not saying you should buy me one for my birthday, but doesn’t this price seem like a steal?

Since I reach a significant Age next week, I had to go to the DMV and renew my license. My car is also going to require renewal in two months, so I figured, hell, they’ll let me do it now, why not kill two birds with one stone! Particularly when those birds are massive, slavering creatures with Adamantium talons who hate me and everything that we as a nation hold dear.

So I snuck out of work for an early lunch hour, thinking I’d beat the crowds. this handy website shows the wait times for various functions, and it was saying I’d wait no more than 5 minutes for my license, and maybe 10 for my registration. Awesome!

I arrived shortly after 11, and got into a short line at the inspection lanes. As I later twittered, I, as always, picked the wrong lane, and watched as 3 or 4 cars who arrived after me got in first. But the joke was on them! I had, completely on accident, picked the one lane that could do all the regular checks (turn signals, lights, horn, etc.) plus the ODBII check (where they plug into your car’s computer to see if you’ve downloaded porn to it)! All the other lanes could do the car checks, but then you had to get into another lane for the computer read-out. This seems like a foolish way to do it, but I grinned happily as I parked and went inside, where I discovered that the South Wilmington DMV, unlike the New Castle one that is technically closer to my house but horribly inconvenient for a lunch hour visit, doesn’t actually have “line;” it has a take a number system, so you can sit and read horrific books while you wait! (I went with Dude, Where’s My Country? by Michael Moore, a book so painful that I got it at the dollar store. For a dollar.)

They were on number 202 when I sat down; I had number 222. So I read, and occasionally glanced up when the shift supervisor, the Mother Superior of the DMV, would get called over to yell at some poor soul who believed they could renew their car’s registration without having the current one, or without an insurance card, or without retrieving their car from the impound lot whence it was towed for unpaid parking tickets. (An aside: some of these people were at least fifty years old. Folks, how do you not know how this works? How do you reach the age of fifty, probably renewing at least one vehicle every two years, and not know what documents you require for this process?)

Finally I was called up to a very polite gentleman who took my documents and money and gave me a new registration and sticker in three minutes flat. I fail to understand why this is such a difficult process for some people.

By that point it was roughly 12:30, and I had to go get another number to wait for my license renewal. I was number #177; they were at #140. I shed a few silent, hot tears and sat down next to some sort of kiosk. After 20 minutes or so, they had gotten only to #150, and a young woman came out and started fiddling with the computer at the little kiosk. In a flash of brilliant insight, I deduced the following:

1. Eventually, this lady was going to open this kiosk for business;
2. It was likely that they intended it to be an express lane, meaning it would most likely be available for people with simple class-D license renewals (no truck licenses, no new licensees, no state IDs, etc.);
3. It was also likely that the line would be first come, first served;
4. The instant they made any sign of opening up, I needed to spring to my feet and sprint to the head of the line, hardly a challenge since the kiosk was approximately three feet to my left.

Sure enough, at about 1:10pm, a supervisor came out and started to announce that they were opening the kiosk for simple license renewals, and before he had said two words I was standing next to the nice young woman running the show. I think I even semi-accidentally butted in front of another fellow, but he sensed that were he to confront me, I might roll up a Driver’s Education Manual and beat him to death with it, so he held his tongue.

Because I know how to handle a drive-thru bureaucracy (just like a fast-food drive-thru; no special orders, basic meals only), I was through the line in three minutes, had my picture taken, and handed a literally piping hot new ID by 1:15. A little creative driving had me back at the office at 1:35! I think the word I’m searching for is “WOO!”

In short, the DMV is slow, news at Eleven.

Can somebody explain to me this new thing where all the ladies are getting their noses pierced? It started at as something you’d see amongst the hard core body decorators, or among certain ethnic groups as a cultural or religious thing, but now I’m seeing just every day skanks showing up with rhinestones jabbed into their schnozzes. I don’t get it. Is it just me? Bueller?

I guess that’s really all I have to ask. I was going to talk about the Gaza Strip, but I don’t have anything to say that hasn’t already been said, and also I’m so distracted by American Idol that I haven’t the words.

Hi! I’m Matt Hearn, and I’m here to tell you that you, too, can learn the secrets of gaining weight. Just listen to these testimonials!

• “Using Matt Hearn’s plan, I gained 8 pounds in just under a month! Then I met a dude that digs fat chicks! ALL RIGHT!” – Tara Lipzinsky
• “I had always been afraid of bacon, but Matt Hearn and his Plan of Deliciousness showed me the light!” – Tom Skates
• “My pancreas stopped producing insulin!” – Sally Struvas

In just 5 easy steps, I’ll show you how you can maximize your chub, while minimizing your ability to walk up slight inclines without chest pains!

1. Are you eating right now? No? That’s a HUGE mistake. My plan will show you how to find the nearest snack machine and select the greatest calorie item for the lowest price! (Hint: avoid crackers, and go straight for the Three Musketeers!)
2. Do you drink a lot of water, or coffee? I’ll show you how non-diet soda can really put the pounds on. (Hint: you might think that sugar packets are only for cofee or tea, but there’s no reason you can’t sprinkle them onto your Dr. Pepper!)
3. Do you drink alcohol? No? Well, we’ll have to work on that too. Your best bet is drinking lots of beer, but that can be hard to do at the office without your coworkers staging an “intervention.” I’ll show you how to fill empty water bottles with cheap vodka (don’t forget to order our special funnel attachment!!!), and chew staggering amounts of Big Red to hide the booze breath!
4. After meals, do you often find that you’re “full” and “can’t eat another bite?” I’ll show you special stomach stretching exercises that will REALLY expand your capacity! And you know what that means: MORE. CHIPS. FOR. YOU!!!
5. Are you vegan and/or vegetarian? Well CUT THAT SHIT OUT.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “Matt Hearn, it can’t be possible or healthy to gain that much weight that quickly.” To which I respond, “Sure it is definitely possible or healthy to gain that much weight that quickly!”

I know this because I’m not just the Matt Hearn Fat Club President: I’m also a member. Through a strict diet of Single-malt Scotch, Christmas cookies, luscious meat products, and a complete lack of exercise, I went from a svelte 235 pounds before Thanksgiving, to a positively BULBOUS 250 after the New Year holiday! Obviously, your results may vary, but I promise you that if you don’t gain at least 5% of your current body weight in one month on my plan, I will personally drive to your house and bake pastry for you until you sweat heavy cream from your pores.

Don’t delay! Order now!

I’m a little apprehensive about sharing this, because, to be frank, I basically poured my heart and soul into it for the better part of two weeks, and I’m still not sure if it’s good. When I listen to it, I’m greatly disappointed, but I usually am when I listen to my own stuff. I’ll stop fishing for compliments. Check check it:

Matt Hearn – Doubting Thomas.mp3

Original song by Nickel Creek; arrangement by Teh Hearn; all voices are Teh Hearn; produced by Teh Hearn.

As you can see, I’m pretty involved in the process.

This is something that had to be shared with everyone on the internet, as fast as humanly possible, with no time for proper scanning and editing, because it is brilliant to the point of personal pain. I give you the new webcomic, written by me and ingeniously illustrated by my sister Liz: Bach v. Handel. That is the full image in its original format; to make it fit within the confines of my webpage, I reproduce it here panel by panel, with explanation:

	Here, Handel plays for Bach the “Amen” from his masterpiece, “Messiah.”
	Bach is unimpressed, and takes over the keyboard to play “Dona Nobis Pacem,” the final movement from his mass in B-minor.
	Handel cries a little, unable to admit that Bach is the superior counterpoint composer.
	Here, we see that Bach and Handel have shared a marijuana cigarette and are now making out.