Accident Prone

Well, everyone’s favorite world-class NASCAR precision driver has made yet another exhilarating trip to the Winner’s Circle.

I was feeling so good. The strike for Pick Up Ax had gone very smoothly and only taken about four hours. Everything was accounted for, cleaned up and on it’s way to storage. So I’m on my way to Angstrom Stage Lighting to return the instruments we had rented for the show, and after dropping everything off I’m told that we’re missing three adapters and two spare lamps. Total hit: about $175.00.

Then, as I was leaving, I backed my Eclipse into a steel pole. Nice. Smashed the right rear tail lamp and scraped up the rear side pretty good. There’s more damage to the car, but you get the picture. And the total estimate for repairing it is exactly $34 over my deductible.

After I got back home, I had a surprise package from Microsoft on my doorstep. A complimentary copy of the final release version of Windows 98. It seemed almost too good to be true. That’s probably because it was. The installation went very poorly to say the least, and I ended up having to delete the registry in order to get the system going at all. The install applet said it would take about 30-60 minutes to complete the installation, but because I was forced to use slower DOS drivers for the CD-ROM, it ended up taking more than two hours, and I had to install several times.

Finally, the HP Scanjet 4p would not show up in the hardware detect. Couldn’t manually install it. After struggling with it for about a day and a half, I finally wiped out the scanner drivers and the registry entries for the Scanjet and SCSI card with RegEdit, then reinstalled Windows 98 one final time. Thankfully that did the trick. Total hit: about 16 hours of work time lost. Now that Win98 is behaving itself I have to say it’s a big improvement over 95.

But enough about that. A big trip is coming up. New Hampshire, for my cousin’s high school graduation. It’s quite a sojourn. First you fly to Boston, then drive north for about three hours until you reach a Grover’s Corners knockoff called Littleton. I’ve only been back there once. Although there’s a lot of respect there, I’m too much of a West Coast native to really enjoy the New England style. I’m not really looking foward to the trip, but I’m not dreading it either. It’ll be good to be away from the ringing phones and incessant e-mail and yes, even the web for a few days. Maybe I’ll have some pictures when I get back.

Somehow I inadvertently planned things so that I’ll be driving out of Logan airport at 5 p.m. on a Friday. If you think L.A. traffic is bad, just take a gander over to Boston. You’ll never complain about “gridlock” in Southern California again.

Los Angeles grew up in the mid-late 20th century–the century of the automobile. Boston matured as a metropolitan area more than two hundred years before Henry Ford was even born. As a result, two hours in L.A. traffic will move you 50 miles. The same two hours in Boston might not move you even a single mile. Bean Town is a much smaller place, to be sure. But that doesn’t make it hurt any less.

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