RPG Articles

So, imagine you’re me. Only better looking and richer, since you’re imagining it all anyway you may as well be happier.

Anyway. You get this POS station all setup and ready to go, everything tested except the receipt printer because, duh, it’s been in use. Big deal, what could happen?

Jesus fucking christ. I plug everything in, and it won’t print. Not even when I use a raw text driver. So, I muck about for an hour or so. Cables are swapped, powers are cycled, ad nauseum. Finally I become convinced the com port has gone splodey or something, so I hope Hyperterminal and just see if I can hit anything on com1. It gives an access denied error.

“What the hell ass?” I think, suavely.

So I remove all the backwards Epson drivers from the Subway site, reboot, and try again. Now I get a message that another program is using the device. Being Windows there’s just no damned way to figure out what is using this port, or at least no way I could find with my brain thinking of nothing more than sleep.

I diddle, I spelunk, I delve, I wanted to commit suicide with the TurboChef. Finally it stumbles into my beaten brain that the touchscreen was initially connected to the com port. Very interesting. So I go through the Elo setup, specifying usb only and… dammit, same damned problem.

In one of those moments where you desperately don’t want to come back, and the brain overloads itself, sacrificing joyous memories and 10 years of non-diaper wearing old age, I was struck with the idea of deleting the com port, then re-configuring the driver.

Stunned as anyone, it worked.

The moral of the story? Kill at least one random stranger, on the off chance he or she may have been involved with developing a shitty driver.

So… maybe I mentioned this already… but I’m joining Aaron in the effort to quit caffeine.

I want to die. I don’t even want a drink of caffeine now, I just want to curl up, and stop existing.

My head and shoulders are a concert of pain. It’s a lot like a precursor to a migraine, only very painful. Things seem too bright, it feels either too warm or too cold.

Seeing Aaron all smug and not suffering makes me want to sneak into his room at night and pour Jolt down his neck.

Wow. This thing is cool. It’s a tool for copying and restoring partitions. You can use it across a network or locally. I just finished imaging a 15GB partition, with just over 10GB of data on it, in about half an hour or so. This is the medium option, which uses gzip for compression, and the resulting image size is just under 6.5GB.

Not too shabby at all.