office life

Posted 2003-05-14 16:54:25 by Jim Crawford My CD-ROM drive has stopped working. I disabled it in the device manager so it wouldn't freeze up the system whenever I tried to select a drive. I just know that when I ask Marvin to check it out, he's gonna see that it's disabled and assume that that's the problem. I tell you, the five second wait for the CD to spin up so that it can read the volume name to display in the drive-select combo box is the modern day equivalent of the infinite Abort, Retry, Fail? “bug” when you tried to switch to an empty floppy drive in MS-DOS. Or maybe the infinite You fool! This is not [disk name], Please insert [disk name] “bug” that for all I know is still plaguing Macintosh users. God, that one was irritating. Also, “Sea Change” is stuck in there, and the paper-clip eject isn't working. This is probably through overuse... it's been acting up a lot lately and so I've been using the paper-clip eject a lot lately also. I figure the drive is toast, so my proposal is to remove the drive and hit it with a hammer until I can see pink. [link to this] [See more on “life”]

comments

i loved that one

Posted by AdamMil on 2003-05-15 10:26:52 I don't think it was actually infinite. You could choose Fail twice, I think, and it would let you out. But this post reminds me of a great "Celebrity Deathmatch" episode pitting Bill Gates against [IIRC] Steve Jobs. Gates was kicking ass with a cyborg suit until it suddenly malfunctioned, leaving Gates debilitated, saying "Abort, Retry, Fail?" over and over in a nerdly voice that grew increasingly desperate as he got whailed on by Jobs' lower-tech but much more reliable fists. I haven't seen a funnier bug.

Abort, Retry, Fail loop

Posted by Anonymous (Craig Timpany) on 2003-05-16 17:28:52 Picking Fail twice!? So it had some invisible state, sort of like a maze in a text adventure. And what was the difference between Abort and Fail anyway?

re: Abort, Retry, Fail loop

Posted by Jim Crawford on 2003-05-18 03:07:23 Obviously, the difference was that pressing Fail twice got you out of the loop :) Actually, I think I read somewhere that fail means "switch drives." Why they didn't just call the option "switch drives," I can't imagine. I'd like to see that celebrity deathmatch. The faceplate turned blue as well, I hope... Where can I find it? Or did you see it on, like, actual TV.

re: Abort, Retry, Fail loop

Posted by AdamMil on 2003-05-18 18:54:53 I saw it on actual TV, but I'd hope somebody has it ripped somewhere. After a bit of googling, I found a couple online copies (from the MTV website even). I also found some higher quality ones on edonkey. So it's out there.

add a comment

Only anonymous comments are available for now until I get the user system up and running again. Not many people were logging in anyway, so enh. Permitted HTML tags: <b>, <i>, <u>, <tt>. Also permitted is the <q> pseudo-tag which is meant to delimit quotes from other messages. name: email: subject: body: Preview To prove you are sentient, please type "sentient" into this box