Last word on Renewal

Epilogue

When boners came easily Years ago I read a book about a family who pulled up stakes to sail to the North Pole, or thereabouts,  and live for a year on the family 35 foot boat. The kids would be schooled by mom, and nature. The father made a conscious decision not to take a marine radio  because, he figured, knowing they had that crutch would render them subconsciously careless. My crutch on this adventure was  DriveImage XML V2.12, certainly one of the top ten free utilities of all time. Because I could restore  any damned thing I wanted,  I failed to make provision for saving things like bookmarks, history, add-ons etc.. Well, I can, but first I have to find the right things in the maze of Mozilla's maze of profiles, blah- blah-blah.  I's daunting. So, tonight I'll prolly restore the old, bloated  waiting-for-disaster  system I'm as least comfortable with.   What I accomplished by spending all yesterday reinstalling Windows. Since I wiped the disk, I have a very clean system I was able to install service pack 3, something I couldn't do before (for some unknown reason) During the hours of waiting for updates to finish  I: Watched 5 Mad Men episodes (I'm hooked) Watched the Curb Enthusiasm  Seinfeld episode.  Clap-clap-clap Watched the first episode of Dexter (HFS!!)  My daughter suggested it.  I expected a comedy. HFS-not.  (She suggested I not  watch a single episode from season 2, which stunk, but season 3 is great). I washed the dishes (MoSop away, day  5) Changed my underpants What I lost in the process: My affable fun loving demeanor 15 hours of my life Years of tweaks, gizmos, and gewgaws that made life easier. My sound (as in the sound stopped working after a Microsoft sound driver update caused a "near fatal error." Even though I rolled back the update and reinstalled the Sound Blaster software, still no sound. My mind, my boner. . On the plus side, the chap I bought the new software from agreed to refund my $50.  How cool is that?  I was hopeful that after jumping through all of Microsoft's hoops I'd  be able to load Media Player 11.  Nu uh.. Without it, I lose most of my multimedia software that is now dependent on it being there.    My late F-I-L griped until the day he died that he was a Social Security "notch baby"  Well,  I'm a Media Center Edition 2002 notch baby.  I've also put off doing so many things in real life that I don't know where to begin with those.  Time for some whiskey.