Right Wing Nation

You realize that 300 came out on DVD Tuesday, don’t you? And I don’t usually shill for Circuit City, because as a general rule, I dislike Circuit City, but they’re selling it for $13.99.

When eating at a Mexican restaurant, I never can decide between enchiladas suizas or enchiladas verdes, and I have the same trouble when decided which to cook. So I threw the two together, kind of a cheesy, creamy enchiladas verdes. Recipe along with pics tomorrow.

First, the USB hub thing. Yes, it did work. All drives (except the buggy one) are online and visible.

Underdog. If you’re of the . . . er . . . right age, there are some things that you might find a bit odd. Polly Purebred is just a bit bimbo-ish, and there is no “Where, oh where has my Underdog gone” song. They keep pointing up in the air and saying, “Look up there! It’s Underdog!” which annoyed me a little until they get it right in the final scene (”It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a frog! A frog? Not bird nor plane nor even frog, it’s just little ol’ me, Underdog!”) He’s named Shoeshine (you’ll have to see it to find out why), but he isn’t a shoeshine, nor does Polly Purebred ever say, “You’re humble and lovable.” He only speaks in rhyme a few times. But there’s no reason not to see it.

In fact, you really must see it. As unfair as it may seem, this movie isn’t directed at us — it’s for kids. Shoeshine/Underdog has some great lines, especially if you’re a dog person. The effete, pinkie-up, “filum buff” reviewers have panned it, but it’s Underdog, ferchrissakes, of course the plot is thin, and who cares? What do you expect, Orson Welles?

Two paws up.

Since we’re going to see Underdog here in about an hour, I decided to shut the desktop down, unplug it (and everything else, except the wireless router), and let it stay unplugged until we get back, just to see if letting it stay unplugged for a few hours will bring both hubs back to life. I know that’s like hoping waving a crystal around over the machine will fix it, but I might as well try.

This started about a week ago when suddenly, my desktop decided my external hard drive needed to be formatted. I tried running chkdsk, but chkdsk crashed. I tried again. Chkdsk crashed again.

I hooked the drive up to my notebook, pulled up a command line, and tried to run chkdsk. It crashed, just like it did on my desktop.

So I took it upstairs to the old 486 running Win2K. And again, chkdsk crashed.

When I hooked it up to the newest notebook running Vista, chkdsk ran just fine. So other than getting a new drive to back up the data and then retiring the drive, I thought that was that.

Uh, no.

I got the new drive, and started backing up data. When I got up yesterday, I saw that after copying about a tenth of the directories and files, chkdsk had started returning “path not found” errors. So I decided to check the drive, and that’s where things started to get really strange.

When I right-clicked on the drive in My Computer and pulled up the properties screen, it reported that 26% of the drive space was free, so obviously, XP knew there were data on the disk. And the directories showed up in the foldier view sidebar on the left. But if I tried to change to one of those directories in the same My Computer window, I got “0 files.” I pulled up a command line and tried dir. Same thing. 0 files.

Then I got the bright idea of trying it on the other machines. Well, this turned out to be a bad idea. Every one gave me a “USB device has malfunctioned” message — which I also got on the desktop when I tried to plug it back in.

And of course you know this is the drive that has all my really important stuff on it, right? If it had nothing but crap on it, it would be running just fine.

That was yesterday. When I got up today, my desktop had one of those obnoxious yellow balloons saying “USB device has malfunctioned,” and note that the buggy drive had not been plugged in. No, this time, the USB device was one of my two USB hubs, so the computer didn’t see any of the connected peripherals. Note that this was a brand new hub I bought and hooked up yesterday. Brand. New. Hub.

I unplugged it, then plugged it back in. Same thing. I rebooted, and this time, my machine returned the same error for BOTH of my hubs. I googled, and found somebody who’d had the same problem and claimed that shutting down, then unplugging the machine for a half hour, and rebooting solved the problem. I decided to try that.

It worked for the old hub, but not the brand new one. I’d had a similar problem before, when one of my peripherals was buggy, so I shut down again, unplugged all of the peripherals from the hub, rebooted, then plugged in the hub with nothing attached, and again, got “USB device has malfunctioned.”

Granted, my desktop has had weird USB issues for a while. If I cold boot with the hubs plugged in, the boot hangs, so I have to unplug them until the XP screen pops up, then plug them in. And my desktop refuses to recognize my flash drive, though my notebook has no trouble with it.

So I have two problems: My hard drive (and data), and that damned USB hub problem. It seems that the only solution to the first problem is to take the drive (and the new one) to Best Buy and have them transfer the files, which will cost $159 (plus tax, of course), and right at the moment, I really don’t have $159 to spend. However, at least there’s a possible solution. I have no idea how to tackle the USB hub problem, or what to do about it, other than spending yet more money on another hub, just to see if it works. I suppose I could take the computer AND the drives to Best Buy, but only God knows how much that would cost.

And as if that weren’t enough, early this morning I decided to start the laser disc to DVD backup. Huh-uh. The DVDR doesn’t “see” the input from the laser disc, even though there’s no reason it shouldn’t. I looked in the manuals. Everything was set up fine, and I did everything I was supposed to.

I was too damned frustrated after the hard drive and USB hub trouble to fight with it.