Brought To You By The Letters 'V' & 'I'

Oh joy. Oh glee. Oh most rapturous of moments, incapable of being contained within the bounds of prose that man has created.

All right, so I'm laying on the sarcasm a bit thick, even given my usual standards. But hey, I'm currently entering this posting via lynx, I think it warrants a little extra something. So why am I posting this via lynx? Well, I went poking around on Maxtor's website, in the hopes of resolving the problem known as the "odd and loud hard drive noises that will be promptly followed by a screen coloured in everyone's favourite shade of blue" and found out that before they will even consider your drive for replacement you need to run a fairly comprehensive series of tests on it.

So, 5 floppy disks later, I finally managed to write the program to the disk, rebooted, and that's where I am now. Sitting in front of a monitor. Watching my Athlon run a series of DOS-based diagnostics that have so far turned up nothing. Logged into my webserver, typing an entry. Using vi. (Lynx got a bit too much, so I was forced to hit ^E^E and load up a real editor.)

I don't know what to hope for from these tests. It's already passed the two most basic ones, and is currently on it's second pass through the most advanced of the non-destructive tests. Finding something wrong would be nice, as it means that I can safey show the results to Maxtor and get it replaced. Passing the test would also be nice, meaning there appears to be no problem. But the thing is I know that there is a problem, and Maxtor won't even look at your drive if it passes all their tests.

So instead I sit here, without even a framebuffer enabled, and type and wait. Oh rapturous joy.

It would seem that while you can type up and save an entry in lynx, you can't actually post it. Guess I need to wait until I get back in an OS where I've installed a graphical browser.