Left-handed Complement

MUDGE‘s Musings

If this latest post looks different, there’s a reason.

A rather disappointing one, actually.

Yesterday afternoon, the official hard drive of the official desktop PC of  Left-Handed Complement died a very slow, lingering but apparently permanent death.

As it was the brains of a 4-year old PC, the issue was whether to dig in and replace the hard drive, which would have resulted in an attempt to reconstruct the world, based on the (of course) frequent backups we perform religiously.

Or, as several colleagues (after all, we’re in the IT business) advised, why put a fresh drive into a 4-year old machine? Starting over would require the same amount of restoration, without all the screwdriver elicited perspiration.

Anyone who knows yr (justifiably) humble svt also knows that I am the living embodiment of a wise saying I read long ago: “Beware the programmer with screwdriver.”

So, trusty AMEX card in hand, I went surfing. Criteria: as much PC as I had before, for a lot less cash. Should have been possible in four years time, especially if the unit were imported from China long enough ago that the dollar’s value held up at least a little.

Because I was in instant gratification mode (needed to get up and running in time to pay end of month bills electronically), offerings from several vendors (I even included Dell in my search, not my favorite vendor [you can read about my experience here]) were attractive, but were not located locally, or needed to be assembled to specification, which I felt was not an option.

So, I ended spending a bit more than I had hoped for the privilege of picking up the box on my way home from work this afternoon, and have spent the intervening hours attempting to rebuild my life.

So far, so so. The important stuff, yes. The truly vital blogging stuff, not so good.

The backup utility that I had been depending upon for Windows Live Writer’s files and settings apparently did not survive the transition from Windows XP to Vista, I surmise, so I am posting “blind.” In fact, I’m not 100% certain I can post at all from the new instance of WLW I just installed. We’ll find that out together.

Last week, my cable ISP left me high and dry for most of three days. This week, I am faced with rebuilding a computer environment in a new operating system environment, while meeting my professional and personal obligations.

Those of us of a certain age might recall a daily newspaper comic strip called “L’il Abner,” by Walt Kelly. There was a character there called Joe Btfsplk, who walked around with a thundercloud directly over his head.

Feel a lot like Joe lately. You’ve been warned.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 9:28 pm and is filed under Blogging, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.