
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.
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