Back in Business

For the second time in the life of my laptop computer (three years in April) the AC power adapter has quit sending the life juice that comes from a wall socket. Of course, this happened while I am in the middle of a project that I have been working on since Thanksgiving and trying to complete before the Night before Christmas. Prior to the failure of the power adapter, I had encountered a program bug in Microsoft's movie maker – too many transitions and the program politely apologizes for the inconvenience but demands to be shut down, no alternative. This discovery came at great expense of time and frustration, but with a valuable lesson. Ain’t nothing good in a free program. (Remember that ObamaNation.)

I even went the radical step of ripping all Microsoft programs from my computer, and reloading the software. This created a few oddities in my computer. One I discovered was none of my video was displayable. After being introduced to the world of codecs - things that make videos work?-I now have, seemingly, all systems working, but continue to have the same flaw that was built into the movie maker. Alas. My father standing in line with me at Best Buy discovered the price tag on the Pinnacle Version 12 Ultimate Movie Maker and handed me his credit card. Merry Christmas. Thank God for Dads.

But just when I thought I was up and creating a movie even little Opie Taylor would smile at, I experienced a Dell equipment failure. Disgusted, I called Dell expecting an Indian to tell me of “No Problem unless Pakistani”. I got a nice guy named TG who told me the product is in stock. Ship date is December 17th. WHAT? Some blah, blah explanation which covers their ass I suppose. Long story, it arrived this morning, four days after the computer power outage, ironically at the same time the ice storm paralyzed the north east.