Today I spent six hours reinstalling my work laptop.

I can't believe it. This is a top of the line machine. It shouldn't need such a drastic reconstruction.

See, both Netscape and Internet Explorer started acting oddly this morning. From best to worst, one of the following happened every time I tried to use them:

* The browser would not display large pages correctly.

* The browser would crash without warning.

* The system would crash to the login screen.

* The system would crash to the boot up screen.

Every time. And I hadn't even changed anything. It just happened. Yes, over the last couple weeks, I've had the odd system problem, but nothing like this.

Sigh.

Went through hell reinstalling too. I contacted Les the Mac Consultant, who advised me on how to possibly fix the solution.

We checked the hardware diagnostics. All fine. Since this was happening in both browsers, it must then be a problem with the operating system.

We couldn't reinstall OS X, as my predecessor installed it off his own disks. So we had to remove it and revert to 9.1. So we yanked it and reinstalled the old operating system.

Of course it didn't work. Remnants of the old system confused the computer, and it refused to boot up.

I did a system restoration while trying to retain the existing file system. No dice. I tried doing a system restoration with a disk wipe. Again, no dice.

Finally, I had to completely reinitialize the hard disk, eliminating the partitions and wiping every last bit of data from it. The reinstall worked finally, and then I spent two more hours reinstalling the software I needed.

I didn't accomplish much today.

So Survivor is not quite as gripping this time around, hey?

That Samburu tribe sure is annoying. Lisa wants to use much harder terms, but this is a family website. I do want to take all four of those "Gen-X" morons and smack them silly.

Not that I find the adults more appealing. I would have fed Linda to a buffalo long before she got voted off the primal continent.

Anyway, here's our picks for this week. If Samburu gets loses immunity, we both expect Teresa to be the one. If it's Boran at Tribal Council, we pick Mama Kim. They'll hate to do it, but she's the slow one.

Speculation has it that tomorrow the tribes will either be merged, formed into two new teams, or three new teams. In such a case, we can't really make an informed guess, but we sure HOPE it's Brendan. Little bastard.

Mom Rating: 1 out of 5. Not only does Mom not understand computer problems, she also doesn't like Survivor.

My day as a Dalmatian

Survivor Logistics

Take me home, big fella