First, check lyrics to David Bowie “Panic in Detroit,” do they fit this situation?

He looked a lot like Che Guevara,
drove a diesel van
Kept his gun in quiet seclusion,
such a humble man
The only survivor of the National People’s Gang
Panic in Detroit, I asked for an autograph
He wanted to stay home, I wish someone would phone

Um, nope.

Be Bop Deluxe “Panic in the World”? Lyrics not online.

Anyway, next section is geek stuff. If that bores you, please skip to a couple of questions at the end of this post.

Managed to beautifully fuck up my laptop last night. I have this virtual CD ROM program called Magic Disc which works well within certain limitations, but I always have to remember to disable it before shutdown or reboot because something in it screws up the booting process on the laptop (works fine on my desktop PC). I keep it because it allows me to have one of my many addictions (a ten-plus year old computer version of the board game Risk) while traveling.

So installed it but it would not complete the installation. Portions of the laptop were frozen. Couldn’t access Magic Disc to disable or uninstall it. Tried killing various processes in Task Manager, no luck. Finally, when all else fails, reboot. And that’s when all hell broke loose, at least in a limited manner.

I simply couldn’t log in to my PC. The fingerprint scanner software wasn’t coming up and I hadn’t logged in with a password in so long I couldn’t remember what my password was. No matter, because each time I tried a traditional login, the PC informed me that only an administrator could login that way.

I spent the night, well part of it anyway, wondering what I was going to do if I couldn’t get this going. I’m not 100% on vacation while here. I do have to get some corporate work done. And will probably have a new BC column due one of these days. And just general web-surfing, planning the next segment of my trip and so on. Email at least still accessible via both Blackberry and iPhone.

As you might have guessed, after sending a panicked email to the help desk, last night I drank semi-heavily to temporarily not think about this.

I’m not even traveling with the DVD-ROM drive for the laptop. The best plan I could come up with, after about 8 glasses of Johnny Walker and soda, was to take the PC to the local computer center, buy a pirate copy of Windows to tide me over, and find some shop with a USB DVD ROM drive to do the install for me. At least this way I’d have internet and access to my files until getting home, even though I’d probably lose the ability for a VPN connection back to corporate servers. A viable plan? Luckily, I won’t need to find out.

This morning, the phone went off early, my friend at the help desk getting back to me first thing. He supplied the admin login for my laptop. And it still didn’t work! I wasn’t able to change the login domain from something corporate to just the local PC.

Finally I had a flash of inspiration. I used the admin login in safe mode. Yippee! I was in. I could then uninstall the offending program. Several minor hiccups along this path but finally successful, on the next reboot everything came back normally. (Hence my ability to post to the blog.)

This does now mean two weeks of not playing Risk – each game takes at least 30 minutes, a most excellent brainless time killer. Solitaire and Hearts not the same.

So, no more heart attack, things are calm and happy.

Questions:

1 – Anyone know of a good, reliable (and hopefully free) virtual CD drive program for the PC?

2 – Any recommendations on where to buy knock-off watches in Bangkok that are better than the crap they sell in the night markets, equivalent to the “AA” quality (or whatever they are called) one finds in certain shops in Shenzhen or other places in China?

3 – Any of my readers ever go to Ko Samet or Ko Chang? Any thoughts on that or other Thailand beach/island reached by taxi/ferry (rather than airplane)? I do not want to go to Pattaya or Hua Hin. My copy of Lonely Planet “Thailand’s Islands and Beaches” is from 2004 and I assume is somewhat outdated.

Hongkie Town
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