No pictures

I came back to lab this afternoon to find a hand-written note scrawled on a sheet of scrap paper sitting on my keyboard. It appears that my work computer has decided not to play nice with the internet, and has been denied access by the department tech service department until the "problem is resolved." This apparently means that I need to completely wipe my hard drive and reinstall Windows. Unfortunately, this is the computer that hosts all of the pictures for the blog, so if you're trying to catch up on blog reading (as I will be doing tonight), I'm afraid there will be no pictures. It figures that this happened the day that Branden left for a long weekend of Robots, because he's the one that would normally deal with this sort of thing. I, for one, am wholly unprepared to go rooting about in the registry for computer viruses. Fortunately, my labmate appears to think that is the most fun thing he could be doing, and spent a lot of today trying to figure out what exactly the problem was. It's strange seeing someone get giddy over hunting computer viruses, but if he's happy doing it, I'll be happy to have it done!

I think this is my fault. See, my students had their exam last night, and the paper for my class had been completed, and the latest manuscript had been submitted to my advisor. So, for the first time in weeks, I thought to myself last night that things were finally under control, and that I could try to spend some time relaxing (it would be really nice if my eyes stopped twitching sometime soon...). I think this was a bad move. First the computer, and now an email from my advisor stating that he doesn't feel that this manuscript is any better now than it was before I spent the last 3 weeks rewriting it. Yup. Definitely called the wrath of destiny upon myself by thinking for a moment that maybe I could start to relax a bit. I guess I asked for it, but it doesn't mean I have to like it.

So, sorry for no pictures. I can upload new pictures via Picasa from my home computer (ironically, I ususally don't do this because I think of my work computer as more stable than an online picture service...guess maybe I should change that idea), so theoretically I will be able to show you new pictures, but the old ones are broken temporarily. Hopefully, my local computer doctor will have a solution soon that doesn't involve completely redoing my whole computer, as that's really a pain in the neck. Stupid viruses...