Why don’t things just work?

Nice follow-up to yesterday’s post. I’m frustrated with things not “just working.”

The light bulb for my torchiere light went out a couple days ago. Turns out it’s a weird bulb, so I had to buy it online (at topbulb.com), but then I stuck in the new bulb, and nothing turned on. Turns out the bulb didn’t die (though it seemed that way), the fucking light died!

Then I realized the recently-installed cheap CD changer still doesn’t play MP3 CDs properly. Better than before, but it still skips. And it can’t be a power issue anymore since it’s getting it direct from the battery. Grr. I hate stuff like that. I may just return the damn thing.

Oh yea, and Windows XP crashed while I was recording something off TV for Olivia. Nice. Luckily I rebooted and I think I only lost 2 minutes of commercials from the recording, so no harm there. But still.

On a final breakage note, yesterday I hit CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE by accident went I meant to hit CTRL+ALT+DELETE. When running X, CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE shuts down XFree86 entirely, if you don’t know (while CTRL+ALT+DELETE does nothing–I needed to send that command to my Windows server which I was VNC’ing into). Well, it turns out that somehow, by shutting down X at the wrong time, my Gnome panel’s clock applet wouldn’t start. Had to dig around the error message to find the solution, but in the end I had to copy my root account’s gconf entries for /apps/panel/profiles/default/ and then re-customize my gnome-panel. Havoc sure was right awhile ago when he said gconf can corrupt sometimes. I didn’t listen, and I had to rebuild my panel as a result. sad

Now I have to get to work. Let’s just hope things work while I work.

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