So.

Instead of recording the IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! slated for today at the office, I brought my USB headset home and tried plugging it into the desktop system here at home.

Windows didn’t like it. I run XP on my desktop since there’s no way on God’s greenish-brown Earth I can afford a legit copy of Vista or 7, and it stubbornly refused to acknowledge the proper drivers to use the headset. I could have used the webcam microphone, but that thing tends to make my voice sound like wet expulsions of ass. So I tried just about everything I could think of to get it working and nothing took.

Over to my laptop, then, I figured. It’s something of a clunker, the display occasionally fizzles and its XP installation is at least partially on a bad sector of hard disk, but Ubuntu runs like a champ 9 times out of 10 and I figured it wouldn’t let me down. However, after playing with a few audio packages it seems that while it’ll record sound from the headset, the resulting sound is a stuttering mess.

At this point I was pretty pissed but I resolved to get the audio recorded anyway despite it being almost 10:30 at night. I might still be something of a slacker, but I’m a professional, dammit, and I promised a generous donor I’d get their ICFN up by tomorrow. So I sat down at the desktop to fire up the webcam microphone and tried opening a browser to see my draft of the post.

The Internet didn’t work.

Apparently the last time I removed the USB headset, the associated drivers took the ethernet connector’s drivers with it. Muttering curses to just about every deity I could think of, I rummaged through my disks to find the one for my motherboard. Wham, into the PC it went. Bam, it found the drivers and began to install.

Boom.

Blue screen of death.

I rebooted.

BSoD again.

Cue the Blue Ink Alchemist screaming obscenities.

So, for now, the desktop PC is bricked. The laptop has no reliable way to record audio. And by the time you fine and patient people read this, I’ll have gotten my face cut open and some hard little bony bits torn out.

Happy Friday.

Or, if you prefer…

FUCK. MY. LIFE.