Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Of Ice Storms and Hard Drives


I find myself pacing around the house tonight. The news has been all gloom and doom today about the weather. We even got sent home early from work today. The drive in to work and drive home with mostly slippery and slidey, so I'm glad we got that opportunity to avoid rush hour. It's glazing up out there now, little ice chips hitting crusted-over snow and sounding vaguely like a crackling fire to me. If you step on the snow, the stop crust breaks like plaster. They say it'll (maybe) be the "Worst Ice Storm EVER" and all day long on Twitter we called it SnoMG!

Every five minutes I pace in here to fret if I should shut down before the threatened power outage happens or run another diagnostic. I've defragmented and run every tool in my System Mechanic's arsenal. My computer is still buggy and freezes up if sitting idle too long or forced to... well, do work.

Not a word in the vein of "pets taking after their owners," either.

The last two weeks have been buggier than ever, computer-wise and last night was my final straw. I couldn't look at a referral someone sent me. Namely, something that could be beneficial to me career-wise. Instead I sat around with egg on my face repetitively rebooting. There's little more emasculating for a guy nowadays than saying "I'm sorry, but I can't really read this right now because my computer doesn't work."

So, I'm going to be stripping her down and reinstalling everything shortly (by which I probably really mean I'll be buttering Matt up to to do it, which I will call him "helping me") and if that doesn't work, I'm going to pony up some credit or get a small loan and finally get myself a new machine.

In my head I call it my "infinite patience," but in reality I think it's just my "infinite masochism." New box coming... or rebuilt one. Either way, the dawn of a new and exciting era. One in which I can sit down and actually want to write a blog post instead of just rebooting and trying fixes.

Meanwhile, the house is chilly and everything's glazing up out there. I'm going to shut down, make a cup of hot tea, and curl up with an honest to goodness book (madness, I know!).

More to follow...

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