Random Commands

The rest of Season 1 of LOST was made of excellent, but the arc moved fairly predictably as I learned more about each character.  There were some surprises, like the discovery of the mysterious hatch, the sabotaging of the raft, the mystery man Ethan Rom, the appearance of Danielle Rousseau, which kept the story moving, but nothing that stands out to me now as head turning, and game changing.  The pace of Season 1 was relaxed as I was introduced to each character via their backstories, we found out some surprises, Locke was a dupe, Kate a fugitive, Boone and Shannon were secret lovers, but nothing game changing.

Then in the season finale all sorts of things happened, the raft launched, then a boat full of others kidnapped Walt (aka Waaaaaaalt) Danielle tried to kidnap Aaron, and Jack, Kate, Hurley and Locke blew up the door of the hatch.  (Oh yeah, Doc Artz blew up too, that was all kinds of amazing)

Which leads to the first classic LOST mind blowing season opener.  Man of Science Man of Faith, the title didn’t give much away, other than stress the building confrontation between Jack and John. The opening scene lured me into thinking, here’s another flashback, but the curiousness of the modern washer and dryer along with an old record player, then a really old exercise bike, and suddenly I’m captivated, this isn’t a flashback, this is someone new… Why does he enter Hurley’s number’s into that old computer? Why is he giving himself an injection?  What was that on his coveralls.  A *BOOM*, dust settling out of the ceiling from the unexpected explosion, an amory full of guns, a fancy mirror system that leads us down a dim hall, then up a shaft, then suddenly staring at the faces of Jack and John peering down out of the torch illuminated darkness.

Oh LOST how much I missed you…

This also setup the tradition of taking a few episodes to wind down from the previous seasons finale, at the end of the episode we didn’t learn anything about what happened on the raft, or to Michael, Jin and Sawyer.  This was all about Jack, who we all knew as the Man of Science, and his healing of a pretty young lady that he saved from being in a car crash (the other victim, the driver, was Shannon’s father… oh LOST! you and your 6 degrees of separation)  His late night run in the stadium with a mysterious Scotsman, that encourages him to hope, to have faith (Maybe Jack is also the Man of Faith?) in his abilities, then goes back to running the stadium tour with a hearty, “See you in another Life, brutha!”

The episode flew by so quickly, that I almost felt cheated… Until the final reveal of the man inhabiting the hatch, was… The man from the stadium tour!  Um, guys… Where ARE we?  And why do I have to wait another week to find out more!

I was reminded yesterday that my whole family LOVES the show Glee.  We’re kinda going through minor withdrawl symptoms since the finale last week, but that should subside slightly with the onset of AI 2010, where my girls, all three of them (@sweetbippy, @Funfizzer and @TotalRenji13) will be rooting for their favorite singer in the batch while we wait for Glee’s return.

At least this year, LOST is on Tuesday nights, and won’t interfere with the American Idol results party we host every Wednesday after choir practice.

We all enjoy the songs on Glee and sing them compulsively over the next few days after an episode airs, a trend that will continue after @TotalRenji’s birthday coup of a copy of the Glee 2 soundtrack album.  This is what happens when you have a family that just loves music, like all the gleeks do in that show.

Beyond the music I also love the humor, from Sue’s biting disdain for anything that isn’t her cheerios, to Brittany’s awesome non-sequiturs.  I also love that the show doesn’t take itself too seriously.  One of the moments that gets lost in every other moment of awesome in this show is the behind closed doors Judges meeting at Sectionals.  The recurring theme of the show has been Mr. Shuester’s constant gaming of his selections by finding out and explaining what the judges will like in the performances of the show choirs.  It’s hilariously funny to find out that none of the judges have any real business judging a choir competition, nor any other singing competition.

I also think they poke fun at themselves for after all the build up of the sectionals competition, we don’t get to see an over the top awards presentation ala the ending of Sister Act.  I’m sure it’s to keep their powder dry for the Finals, but in the end the Sectionals should always have been won by the wonderful Gleeks of Wiliam McKinley High.

Okay, so I made a nice little list of episodes that I thought were game changers, ranked them in order, so I could to a top ten count down like build up thing.  Then I LOST the list.  Oh Irony, smite me now!

So change of plans, I’ll just blather on about the game changers that matter to me, no more rankings, and y’all can self-rank, agree, disagree or just point and laugh in mirth in the comments.

So…

Walkabout

This was the fourth hour of the LOST universe, and while the Pilot and Tabula Rasa were both wonderfully done, and had all the nice twisty turns we’ve come to love and expect from LOST, Walkabout is the one that dug the fish hook into the flesh of my cheek and hooked me into fandom.

We’d gotten some hints that Locke’s character was a bit dualistic by this point.  He’d been forming a friendship with Walt, gave an impressive little solioquy about the game of backgammon, and  of course the orange rind smile both entertained and creepied me out.

The opening scene of the crash and the yellow-threaded toe wriggle should have cued us in that the writer’s were going to pull one over on us.  The setup set in our brain, we go back to present island time and backing Vincent, and a fuselage full of boars (not Sawyer… Jack).  The scene had me leaning to an exposition of the monster, or whatever it was, but it just became a mundane normal creature, that John Locke would now become the hunter/provider of the survivors.

The secondary story of gathering kindling and firewood to torch the fuselage, while peeking at Sayid’s triangulation plan to locate the 16 year old signal.  The episode had a more relaxed feel, with the ending montage of the the survivors as the fuselage burns was touching with Michael Giacchino’s soaring score.

The flash of a hunting knife, contrasted with Locke’s exposition on the details and habits of a razorback boar, had be totally bought into flashback’s tickler that Locke was a military man, but we soon realized that Colonel Locke was his name only in a fantasy role playing game he played at lunch, while getting humiliated by his boss Randy.  The haunting sound of Locke’s adding machine, echoes the now telltale sign of the imminent appearance smoke monster.

The meandering stories this episode sets up so many themes that carry through the rest of the season, some even carry on into season six: caring for and memorializing the dead, figuring out more about the transmission, the hunt for food and provisions, thy mystery of the monster, destiny, “don’t tell me what I can’t do”, Nadia,  Helen, the relationships between Rose and Jack, Michael and Sun, Charlie and Hurley,  even Charlie and Shannon are all entertwined in a story of a boar hunt gone wrong.  The ending hooks of finding out that Locke was going on a walkabout while wheelchair bound, Jack running after the guy in the blue suit to find a blood covered John Locke hauling in the corpse of the boar.

They hid a lot of things in plain sight in this episode, but within it I saw into the heart of the series, and what I saw was … beautiful.

I got this question on my Formspring.me question thingy:

Do you think the Reset worked… i.e: Will Season 6 open with flight 815 landing in LA?

My short answer is still – Yes.  This post should expound on why I think it’ll happen, and what that means for the rest of the final season.

The first episode has been revealed to be LA X, the comiccon videos all hinted toward a universe where Oceanic flight 815 never crashed, and people were living their lives as if the crash never happened. So either the producers are going this route, or attempting the largest head fake ever!  They’ve had a habit of hiding things in plain site before, with Damon autographing a fan’s disc cover with the secret of what’s inside the hatch. He didn’t even lie a little, telling exactly what was inside, and no one really believed it.

Many have said that a reset ruins everything, as if the entire previous seasons would be washed away.  I don’t really think that’s the case.  There has always been a strong thread of FATE throughout the series, from Charlie’s fingers, to Locke’s insistance that everyone was there for a reason.  I don’t think a reset changes all that much.

Eloise Hawking told Desmond Hume, “The universe, unfortunately, has a way of course correcting.” The proof she alluded to was the man with the red shoes, then Charlie’s eventual death.  She alluded that if Desmond didn’t do the things he was supposed to do “we are all dead.”  Who she meant be “we” is kind of relative isn’t it?

So if the universe course corrects, maybe Oceanic 815 was never supposed to crash, maybe what we’ve been through is a huge entire course correction, putting people back into the places they were supposed to be on September, 22 2004.

That doesn’t mean that in 2007 people are exactly where they’re supposed to be, and the drama of the first part of 2010 LOST will be the unraveling of people’s 2004 lives to get to exactly where they’re supposed to be in 2010.

Thoughts, disagreements, agreements, are all welcome in the comments.

Before this episode, some changes happened in the Oceanic 815 survivor camp, with Sawyer claiming some power in the camp by capturing all the guns, and becoming the new “sheriff in town”.  They’ve been joined by the “Tailies” and have discovered the Swan station.  Sayid was called on by Rousseau to capture a man wandering the jungle by the name of Henry Gale, whom Rousseau thought was “one of them”.  I thought the others were a ramshackle bunch of jungle survivors, and the well dressed Mr. Gale didn’t really mesh with that perception.

Backstory wise, I knew about John’s relationship with his father, and with Helen, but hadn’t really nailed down some of the core parts of John’s willingness to be used as a dupe by people he thought he should trust.

This episode was a game changer, both in my perception of Locke, but also of the character of the island.  The world we were discovering had just gotten bigger.

The last quarter of this episode dropped bombshell after bombshell on us after the Lockdown warning blared, and the blast door crushed John Locke’s legs.  It was one of the first “water cooler” episodes where the next day everything revolved around the ‘blastdoor map’.  Yet, the map was only the first of three major game changers.

The second was the supply drop, which was the reason for the Swan Station lockdown, which Jack and Kate discovered as they wondered back from the beach poker game, where Jack won back his medical supplies in a match against Sawyer.  The beach scenes served as the lighter moments as Jack demonstrated his influence over the now cocky Sawyer.

The last show stopper was in the final moments, as Sayid and his partners Ana Lucia and Charlie join Jack and Kate in confronting Henry Gale, with proof that while he was right about the grave, and the hot air balloon, the real Henry Gale was an african american male from Minnesota.  Henry Gale was a liar.

The acting of Michael Emerson always impressed me, his wonderfully delivered “Got Milk” soliloquy in the previous episode, had us on our toes for an ambush on Sayid’s group.  Locke’s wariness after that revelation, soon led to reluctant trust, as he had to enlist his prisoner’s help in trying to get free from the main room of the Swan station after the blastdoors came down.  The ticking of the clock, and the alarms blaring as the timer expired and Henry disappeared to push the button, was suddenly and jaw-droppingly forgotten as the room went dark, and neon fluorescent illuminated the laundry soap smearing of the blast door map.

This was the ultimate “we’d better watch that again” moment as so many secrets and hints were embedded in that six short seconds of screen time.

With the final season of LOST just around the corner, it’s time to get the Twitter rewatch back in full stream.  We’ve had a nice break over Thanksgiving, and all you all everybody has had a chance to get their hands on the LOST Season 5 DVDs. (some of us were lucky and won a contest, and have recieved the LOST Dharma Initiative Orientation kit… be very jealous)

So it’s time again, to get to re-watching.  The Season 5 #LOST #WFTB Twitter re-watch party kicks off on December 14th at 9PM CST.  The rest of the schedule is here, so bookmark it.  (Or just ask me @LOST_WFTB on twitter)

What do you need to do to join in?  I made a handy list:

1. Follow me @LOST_WFTB for #WFTB news updates and reminders.
2. You might consider following my list of WFTB regulars, and if you aren’t on that list, give me a holla on twitter and I’ll add you.  The list feature of Twitter is also a great way to participate in the #WFTB Live tweets, if you don’t have TweetDeck (my favorite) or some other Twitter client.
3. Get your DVD (or stream, or whatever you use to watch episodes) ready with time to spare.  I try to be hitting up twitter with reminders at least 42 minutes in advance, but sometimes I’m late, keep an eye on the #LOST #WFTB hashtags.
4. Start on time (I usually tweet at “Press Play” tweet at the starting time.  I post times in my time zone, CST, so be prepared at your local time.
5. Start watching and tweeting your comments, all types of comments are allowed.  Snarky MST3K type, or obeservations, or OMGILTS.  Include the episode hashtag (usually #s5E1 or whatever episode we’re on, the finale will have a special hashtag.
6. Have fun! Everyone is a LOST fan, and all shippers are welcome.
7. Last and final one, is don’t be a jerk. (That is a general rule of the internet, IMO) We all love the show, and with that common thread, we should all be able to get along.

Namaste, and if you’ve read this far, congratulations.

If you are hard core invite a friend, like @CarltonCuse, @DamonLindelof or @EWDocJensen to join in on the re-watch.  How awesome would it be to have them join in… supremely awesome, beyond words.

See you Monday at 9PM CST.

Dear Jeff,

I can call you Jeff, can’t I? Since I’m one of fourteen of the people that you follow on Twitter, I could be presuming too much that we are now, like, BFFs? Maybe I should call you Doc? Or possibly Mr. Jensen. But that seems too informal, since I’ve been reading your LOST columns for many years, I feel like I know a little bit about you. Though I probably hardly know you at all, and so should probably be more formal than just Jeff, or, “Hey Doc”. Sigh, I seem to have gotten a bit circular, which having read your columns, I think your probably familiar with my dilemma.

Let’s just cut to the heart of the matter, shall we? I was going to title this post “A LOST fanatics guide to Twitter”, or alternatively, “Doc Jensen needs HELP!” But at the last moment, I’ve shied away from such vanity. Though I do feel a bit of responsibility for getting you set straight on Twitter, and how to use it’s cryptic but useful syntax and customs. I don’t want you to look too noobish, like Neal Patrick Harris, who apparently, while brilliant and was a practicing Doctor at a very young age, can’t quite count to 140. So I thought I’d help you out. Oooh! Just thought of another alternate title: “The Keys to the Hieroglyphs: LOST Twitter Guide” Yeah? Hm. Too presumptuous.

I’ll just start at the beginning.

140 characters, that’s all you get. You could go to some services like twitlonger or tumblr to get more words linked to your tweets, but that’s a bit lame. IF you MUST be wordy, get a blog, or write a column for Entertainment Weekly, or something. Keep your tweets at 140 characters, that’s the LAW. Even @jacob_islandgod has to use 140 characters. Also the 140 character limit includes any of the names you’ve addressed in your tweet, so you might even have to edit more. I know, I know… it might be hard to do for a person that has a way with words, such as yourself. I don’t make the rules of the twitterverse, I wasn’t even consulted.

Some characters are more special than others, think of these of those that are on Jacob’s list. These characters are:

• @ – The “at” sign is like an address.  The @ sign is used to address a tweet at someone, or to have the tweet show up in their Mentions feed.  So, for example, any tweet with @LOST_WFTB shows up in a special way to me.  But you @EWDocJensen might not even realize that it’s been tweeted.  Also with the @ sign, if it’s placed at the very beginning of your tweet, it’s sent as a semi-private tweet to that one twit.  Kinda like when Ben used the mirror to flash a signal to Richard before turning himself into the Orchid Station.  People following Ben, (Locke and Hurley) knew about the message, and all of Richard’s followers knew about the message.  But Kemy and his posse, or Jack and his team had now idea about the message.  So be aware, that tweets starting with @LOST_WFTB will only be seen by those twitterers that follow both you and me.  Everyone else might not see the tweet.
• # – the ‘pound’ sign is called a hashtag in twitter.  It’s kinda old skool, but still very useful.  It can be used to ‘tag’ your tweets with a special symbol or sign that your tweet has something to do with #LOST or #FlashForward or #Fringe.  Such tags help people search and find topics.  There are no real rules, it’s kind of a make it up as you go along thing.  Ask @DrDreia the self confessed #queenofthebaroquehashtag for more details. Another special tag that I use a lot is #WFTB which means (to me) Watch From The Beginning.  Which is the name of my LOST Re-watch that is based on Twitter feeds.  More on that later… maybe in a special edition of post on this blog.
• D – This may look like the letter D, but in twitter at the very beginning of your post, it takes on great meaning.  It’s stands for Direct Message (or DM).  This is used with a valid username to send a private message to another user.  Think of it as Ben sending a min-tape to Juliet to communicate secrets without the prying eyes of other people listening in.  Of course, if your recipient goes ahead and retweets a DM then you’re screwed. Maybe.
• RT – This isn’t official, but it’s stilled used by all the cool kids.  It stands for re-tweet, and it’s a bit contreversial for people with nothing better to do than to worry about proper citation syntax.  You know, the kind that read the Chicago Manual of Style, AP Stylebook, or Strunk & White curled up next to the fire, with a glass of chianti and some fava beans (Or write the awesome iPhone app Tweetie). But for us cool kids, that really could care less we just tack on an RT (or use TweetDeck to RT old skool) at the beginning of our tweet to re-broadcast something that we like or think is cool.  This is like, well, remember in the Lord of the Rings, when they lit those signal fires on the tip-tops of the mountains (and boy, who are the losers that get that duty station?) Retweets are kinda like that, public rebroadcasts of good information.  Twitter went ahead with this concept and made it a feature, but it’s kinda different, and kinda lame, being that it’s officially sanctioned and all.  Kinda like roaming the halls of highscool with a hall pass.
• URL shortening services.  These are a must by the hard core twits, to keep the 140 characters alive with content, and less with the arcane url syntax.  So if you want to keep big long strings of URL’s outta your tweets (like http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20313460_20325436,00.html for example) use http://bit.ly or http://is.gd to shrink your URLs and unlock the code to better tweets. (Or use TweetDeck, which can shrink URL’s automatically.

Well Doc, that’s it, The secret of the Twitter codes and gylphs. I hope you enjoyed reading, and take this with the humor that I’ve intended.  Also, keep pushing the LOST Themed Disney Attraction petition… We’ve gotta get @DamonLindelof and @CarltonCuse to sign that thing.

To my faithful readers, who are legion:  What advice about twitter would you give Jeff “Doc” Jensen?  Put it in the comments.

I made a off hand comment on Twitter to a friend:

@mfeige 1) never be sorry for Disneylan 2) I want pictures of when Tom Sawyer’s Island becomes LOST

(yeah, I tweet like a blog with typos)
Then I made an all out tweet:

Disneyland’s Tom Sawyer Island transformed to Pirates Cove… would be better as Dharmaville LOST Island. who’s with me?

Then suddenly:

EWDocJensen

I TOTALLY SECOND LOST_WFTB’s CALL FOR TURNING TOM SAWYER ISLAND AT DISNEYLAND INTO #LOST ISLAND! GET ON THAT, DISNEY!

Are you KIDDING ME. Jeff “Doc” Jensen agrees with me!!! (there aren’t enough exclamation points)

Then to totally rock my world he added:

EWDocJensen LOST_WFTB: Seriously, dude. Start a petition. I’ll help promote it. We’ll get this done. I have no doubt Mighty Disney will bow to our will.

So Uh, One problem, I don’t know how to make a petition… But
I HAVE A BLOG! and Instapundit says that’s better.

So sign this post and do whatever you wanna do to get this done.

DISNEY MUST MAKE A LOST ISLAND ATTRACTION!

sign the petition here: http://www.petitiononline.com/lostdisn/petition.html

(okay, also add any imagineering ideas to the comments… we can DO IT! /ty voice)

Holy Cannoli… Damon Lindelof just tweeted:

DamonLindelof

@EWDocJensen — Carlton and I have been pushing to get a damn polar bear on Tom Sawyer Island for YEARS!!!!

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about anything.  That’s because I’ve been a bit busy with life.  But if you follow me on twitter, you’ll know that steadily for six months now, I’ve been tweeting about LOST episode by episode as a group of us have rewatched the show.  I even started a separate twitter account (@LOST_WFTB) to keep track of the whole thing.  Please allow me a moment or two of navel gazing as I write a few words.

Season 5 Finale aired on May 13th, 2009.  We started rewatching the following weekend, and by Monday had an official re-watch schedule to watch as a group starting with Tabula Rasa (S1E3) on Monday May 18th.  Last night we completed the strike shortened Season 4 with a rewatch of There’s No Place Like Home Part 2.

My number of tweets since I started the @LOST_WFTB account stands at 9,833.  While not every tweet is about LOST (many are promotional and scheduling oriented, some are about Bones or other TV shows) the majority are from rewatch nights.

I’ve gained a following of 599 other tweeters, and have followed back 540, of which the majority are dyed in the wool LOST fanatics.  I’ve been fortunate to be listed in 77 of Twitter’s lists (a feature that didn’t even exit when we started six months ago). I’ve met some fanstatic people and have enjoyed every moment of the show.

Starting this twitter group has allowed me to meet and follow some amazing people, keeping tabs on my favorite show, and living vicariously through all the lucky bastards that got to go to ComicCon in San Diego and then tweeted about it.

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all the devoted tweet addled addicts like me, that have joined in.  The group has ebbed and flowed through the six months, but as a whole, I think we’re all mostly upto date on the re-watch.

Now, we are taking a pause.  The Season 5 DVDs get released on December 8th, and that night (I plan on making a Walmart run, if not watch one of my archived episodes) we’ll kick off Season 5 rewatch.  The schedule has us finishing up Season 5 on January 15th, which gives us 5 days of rest until Season 6 premiere (if the start date for S6 doesn’t change).

So if you’ve slacked off on your re-watch, fallen behind, life has thrown you a curve: Now is the time to catch up.  You can even just start new with Season 5 rewatching on twitter.  Follow me @LOST_WFTB and I’ll keep you upto date on scheduling with irritating reminders.

Thanks so much for participating, and stay LOST.

This is a sad saga, because it really shouldn’t be this difficult.  I should be able to say, “Woo! WHS paid off again, thanks my little backup buddy!”

But I can’t fully give a big *high 5* to the WHS, though it came out the winner, it got bruised and battered on something that ended up being easily fixed, but that fixed relied too much on me finding answers outside of normal MS channels.

First, some background. We have two kids with September birthdays.  We decided to pool resources with family and get them one big present, we got them each a Dell Mini 10.  Sweet little portable laptops.  (I’m ignoring the, “Wait, it isn’t September yet!” question, maybe another post, so put your hand down).  So they’ve been enjoying playing with them. 

In a fit of uncoordinated laziness, I tossed one of the power supplies to my youngest so he’d have it to recharge.  A bad throw followed on the heels of that bad idea, and the cute little charger hit the cute litte keyboard right about the letter ‘F’ which is right above where the hard drive resides (I found this out later).  Movie stopped working, reboot was met with a BSD.

*gosh* stream of thoughts follows roughly:

• I’m an idiot.
• Good thing I made sure it backed up to WHS (Windows Home Server) last night.
• Hard disk is probably toast.
• I’m an idiot.
• Should have gotten the SSD instead of the SATA hard drive, less moving parts
• I’m an idiot.
• I’d better call Dell, it’s still under warranty.
• I’m an idiot.
• Run the diagnostics first, so you can speed up the Dell support call
• I’m an idiot.
• Oh cool they have a Dell support Chat, I don’t have to SPEAK to anyone. FTW!
• I’m an idiot.
• Waiting for a Support agent, 67 in line.
• I’m an idiot (repeats 67 times)
• Oh hi, Mr. Dell Support person that types really good English, my hard drive is toast, please replace it.
• Thank you, awesome, cool.
• I’m an idiot (repeats 2 days while waiting package).

Hard drive comes and it’s pre-imaged with the software load, and they re-included the DVDs/CDROMs of software that is installed.  Nice touch, but since the Mini 10 has no optical drive, not really necessary and/or useful, a USB with the same content would be teh awesum though, please make note, Dell.

So while I quickly swapped out the drive, and restarted and the computer did it’s little ‘first time installation’ thingy.  I started creating a USB key to have it restore from the WHS.  I had to relearn some lessons:

1. To make a bootable USB key you need to use a Vista machine and use the diskpart, so I had Angie do that part for me.
2. Next is just copy the files from the Windows Home Server Restore CDROM image. I do this by loading the CD-ROM image with Nero Image Drive, rather than burn onto plastic, then copy.

After a bit, and about the time the ‘first time’ processes got done I had a USB stick ready to roll.  Plugged it in, booted up the Mini-10 attached it to the wire at the network switch and…

Nothing.

Dell Mini 10 couldn’t find the server.

Three hours later, and google searches galore, I got it to work.  Here’s a break down.

• Dell Mini 10 uses a RealTek PCI-E Ethernet driver.  The driver on the WHS Restore CD-ROM identifies it correctly, and it all appears to be ready to work.  But it doesn’t work.
• The drivers on the Mini 10’s installation, (XP NDIS variety) also don’t work (if you copy the c:\drivers directory to the usb stick and then scan for additional drivers, it finds them)
• The drivers on the WHS PowerPack 3 Beta restore image, also don’t work.
• The drivers for the Vista (Windows Server 2008) do work, but you have to download them from the vendor, (not Dell, Realtek) then extract and stuff the drivers into a drivers folder on the USB stick, and then scan for additional drivers.

So once I figured all that out, by brute force, trial and error, I was glad for my 8 years of education in computers and 20 years of practical education.  And if anyone else buys a WHS and then a Dell Mini 10, I’m sure they’d stuff it all in the trash and go live in the wilderness.

Though I understand that technologies change, and the Dell Mini 10 is new technology…  C’mon, Ethernet drivers shouldn’t be an issue!

The bright spot of the story, is the computer is back in the midget’s grubby little hands, looking and working just like it did moments before the power adapter harshed the hard drive’s mellow.  I just wish two things.  Drivers need to be easier, or at least an better error message on how to troubleshoot drivers in WHS.  And that they built hard drives at least as ruggedly as they do key-caps (no damage sustained by the failed lob).