Marathon

I really wanted to do more today than sit in front of a computer. But it took 2.5 hours on the phone with Microsoft tech support to fix the BSOD which upgrading to Vista SP1 from XP Pro inflicted on me. Both techs I worked with were good. Methodical, logical, told me when they had to put me on hold to look something up or ask someone else. Both non-native English speakers, but both perfectly understandable. One Scandinavian and one Middle Eastern. It took a long time because of Microsoft's legendary piece-of-crap KDB, which is full of vague hints but not a lot of answers.

And it took longer than it should because Vista's BSOD is useless as a troubleshooting tool. The error message, BAD_POOL_CALLER at 0x000000C2 is simply a "one of your 12,384 drivers is freaking out Vista".

Turned out to be two drivers. I have a PCI wireless adapter from D-link which caused the initial crash, but once we disabled that and got from 64% installed to 89% installed, it took disabling the modem driver to get past the BSOD. Simply removing those and re-installing allowed both devices to come up properly. WTF?

Now I have to call Adobe, because the upgrade broke their asinine Pagemaker and InDesign licenses. And Seamagic hangs during the login process, so I'm writing this straight into LJ. If anyone can suggest another Vista-friendly LJ editor, I'd be much obliged.

Dress rehearsal at 6:30. Maybe I'll have time for something else before then. Maybe.

Weirdness

Semagic is now working. Like magic. All I did was reboot after disabling IE's debug widget. Which I suppose was what was making it hang.

To answer iamradar's post to the previous message, both devices which caused BSOD (wireless card & modem) are Vista-compatible, and worked when I first built the machine with Vista64. Too many things didn't work with Vista64, and several people on LJ and at Microsoft pointed out that there are almost no 64-bit programs, so I nuked Vista and clean-installed XP Pro.

When Vista SP1 was released, I bought the upgrade version (I didn't want to mess with a clean install and days of re-installing all my programs). Both the modem and the wireless card are working fine now, using the same drivers which caused the BSOD! The drivers just needed to be removed and re-installed, because Vista's upgrade app is broken.

Pisses me off, because as you said, it's a very short list of cards they support, they could easily have done some QA testing on the upgrade process.

Challenging

My first rehearsal in costume went well costume-wise. I have plenty 'o' time to do my two changes, and they are pretty easy.

This was also the first time we had the orchestra in their assigned location in the stage right wings. We weren't miked and neither were they, so musically it was a disaster. I am not pleased. It was two good groups of musicians communicating by Ouija board. Blindfolded. Wearing ear muffs. We have been promised tomorrow night we will both be miked, which will be good for the orchestra because they will be able to hear us, but this is a theater with an intelligently designed speaker system, which means the speakers do not feed back to the stage. Which means it will be a miracle if we can hear the orchestra. The cue for my song is a snare drum, which is all the way in the stage right corner of the wings, and I am most of the way stage left onstage. All I could hear was white noise, I could not hear the beat. I think I landed on the right note, though. I know I was not at the right tempo for the first two verses, when the orchestra comes in.

While I was waiting for my cue backstage, I watched the brass section, looking over their shoulders to read the music, and was very impressed by the trombones and French Horns. The trumpets actually sounded good this time when they were warmed up, but I couldn't squeeze behind them to see their music. After the rehearsal I caught up with one of the horn players in the parking lot to tell her she was awesome. Not only was she playing her part, she was showing the other horn player where they were in a very messy looking piece of sheet music.

The acting has really come together well. The set looks great, though it's not quite done yet. Costumes & props are in better shape than at closing night in some shows I've been in. Problems are being brought up, acknowledged and addressed, in all areas.

Tomorrow we add makeup and mikes. Should be way too much fun.