Called in sick

[azurite]

I woke up at 8am this morning with a stomachache from hell. Why? I have no clue. All I know is, I hate the possibility of it being caused by food that was delicious and that I love to eat whenever I get the chance. In this case, it's either the Chinese food I ordered after work yesterday (when I met Grandpa at Vons) or the Blueberry Morning cereal I had for a late dessert while I was watching a Sailor Moon S marathon.

(By the way, smrffers-- Usa Day *WILL* start next week, and I might even contribute something for it if I can get my brain churning. I'm already thinking of some articles for the SM-section of Epiphany, which I really want to get live before the end of summer.)

So I called in sick, because I'd gone to bed with a horrid headache, and the slightest tinges of it were telling me it was going to come back. And it did. I went back to sleep and woke up again (around 10:30 or 11) feeling like someone had partially chopped my head open (think headband-style). I kept touching my head thinking I was going to find some disjointed part of my skull where I could just reach in and touch my BRAIN! Eew. Shudder-twitch-EEW!

So I'm still feeling kind of ill (want to eat, but something tame-- maybe Cream of Wheat with just raisins and some cinnamon?), and almost scared to go back to sleep even though my head is pounding-- I mean, what the hell prompts dreams about getting beheaded improperly? (Does this have something to do with my wanting to go to Egypt and everyone in my family always saying "No, not this year, you'll get your head chopped off!"?)

Speaking of Egypt, yesterday I got my copy of "Pharaoh Gold" (which includes the Queen of the Nile: Cleopatra expansion) yesterday, and I tried to install it-- it seemed to work okay, but I couldn't run the game, even with either CD in the drive. I didn't get an error or anything-- nothing came up. There was an hourglass, then nothing, just an arrow sitting there all "Dur, what you want me to do?" So I figured, maybe there were some remnants from the copy of the game I had (the single CD version that was all scratched up-- a U.S. edition, I should note, because the Pharaoh Gold copy is from the U.K.), so I removed the new program, edited the registry to remove all data about the OLD game. I made sure it took effect in the Add/Remove programs list, and then re-installed Pharaoh Gold when I got home.

...Still nothing. I thought it was odd that my Windows drive was saying it was about 8GB when I clearly specified in Parallels for it to be expanding up to 15GB, and all these damn "Low on disk space!" errors were getting on my nerves, so I searched the forums, discovered Parallels 3 no longer has Image Tools (which you would use to resize the virtual disk image after you'd created it and put stuff on it), so I had to use this other DOS-based tool to do it. So I did, and I also defragged the drive... but still, NOTHING, even after the defrag (not the Windows one, either-- a much more intensive one I found a 30-day trial for) proclaimed my drive "healthy."

I click on the game icon in the start menu, my Games shortcut folder, or in the Recently-Used programs list, and NOTHING HAPPENS. No error, no pop-up, no nothing. Just a brief arrow-with-hourglass, and then NOTHING. >_<

HEEEELP! What do I do?

Comments

[azhp.livejournal.com]

Dumb question, but are you sure the UK game will work on a US platform? There are some instances of that sort of lockout occuring.

[azurite]

Well it looks like the only thing that's different is the packaging and the advertising during the install. I think if it recognized some sort of difference between U.S. computers and U.K. ones (I don't think there's a Euro-Windows XP), it would have told me during the install.

[azhp.livejournal.com]

Well, they might not have tested it on American Windows XP because there would have been no reason to.

[azurite]

I looked up the possibility of there being a Windows XP for Europe that wouldn't be compatible with U.S. games (or vice versa), but the only thing I found was a WMP-less version of XP called "Windows XP [Edition] N." So it's basically the same, minus the WMP. That doesn't explain my problem at all.

[labrown.livejournal.com]

Try this:

Click on Start and navigate All programs down to the menu where your Pharoah program is, then right click on it. Select Properties, Click on the Compatibility tab, Click the "Run this in Campatibility mode" checkbox and selected Windows 2000.

Then try it.

I had to do this to get the Pharaoh/Cleopatra combo set to run on my WinXP laptop.

--[Lance]

[azurite]

Ah yes, that was one of the first things I did, since it makes you do that in the installation program I had. I went to the forums and talked about it there, but nothing was of any use. I ended up installing it on my other, older PC (which I hardly use). Not the best case scenario, but there was nothing I could do.