Computers Suck!

"Let's face it, the average computer user has the brain of a Spider Monkey."
- Bill Gates

They really do. Suck, that is....

Do you speak Geek?

I just spent the better part of 3 days fighting with evil computers, rat's nests of tangled cables, burned out power supplies and unnecessarily complicated Microsoft silliness.

See, my power supply fried which caused my hard drive to crash which scrambled all my data thus making my email inaccessible.

Ok, so no biggie, right? A quick run to the local Geek Shop for some parts and I'd be back sending out annoying emails and goofy blogs in no time. Think again... I forgot to take into account that my poor old brain just doesn't work like it used to. You might say that the data on my internal bios is a little hosed... and my memory ain't so hot either.

Random Access indeed...

I'll spare you the gory details but to make a long story short... I got all the hardware installed without incident. Got Windows installed and updated with all the hundreds of security updates, service packs and some other weird stuff which I don't even know what it does but I apparently need.

It wasn't until I began trying to restore all my important data that things began to go haywire. Backing up and restoring data is a normally simple procedure that soon had me cursing the day Bill Gates was born, gnashing my teeth and staring numbly into a blank monitor for minutes at a time.

All my emails, medical records, financial records, passwords and on and on... about 20 years worth.. all gone. Well, not gone exactly - the data was still there on the disk, I just couldn't seem to get it back into my system in a usable form. It should have been simple.

For 8 hours, maybe more like 12, I read articles and FAQs and expert advice from an army of Windows gurus, following intricate instructions to the letter, all just to get my email program to be able to see my emails again. Nothing worked.

Around midnight, after having struggled mightily on this one problem for the whole day and night, I ran across a few lines of simple advice from some anonymous guy on the web, an amateur geek like me. Just like that, problem solved. Once I knew what to do, it took me all of 5 minutes to finish the job.

But I'm finally back up and running and, much to my surprise, I only spent 74 bucks. I must have done something wrong.


I'm not sure there is a point to this story except maybe to point out that as miserable as I make it all sound, I was secretly enjoying myself. Even before all my cancer woes, getting myself all caught up in a computer problem or project was an enjoyable experience even when it started edging from interesting to annoying to frustrating.

Now days, I figure that being distracted and annoyed by inexplicable and mysterious computer problems is more fun than being depressed and anxious about cancer.

Besides, maybe it will help keep my brain from turning to mush.

So with all that in mind and now that my system is working well again, I've decided to start 2 new projects.. First, I'm going to redesign this Blog (to go along with the new name I'm trying to come up with).

And, for a bigger challenge, I'm going to turn this older system that I have laying around into a file server for my network using Ubuntu Linux.

I guess I'm just a glutton for punishment but hell, it beats sitting around worrying about being sick.

And for now at least, I've got nothing but time....