Henry Jones Syndrome

Professor Henry Jones: Well, he who finds the Grail must face the final challenge.
Indiana Jones: What final challenge?
Professor Henry Jones: Three devices of such lethal cunning.
Indiana Jones: Booby traps?
Professor Henry Jones: Oh yes. But I found the clues that will safely take us through, in the Chronicles of St. Anselm.
Indiana Jones: But what are they?
[pause]
Indiana Jones: Can't you remember?
Professor Henry Jones: I wrote them down in my Diary so that I wouldn't *have* to remember.
~~~ from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

It's been two weeks since the world trembled before the power of this FULLY OPERATIONAL computer of mine...

Okay. I'm not fully operational still. The reason is that I can't remember all of what I was doing way back before I had a special-effects sequence in the middle of my computer. I can't remember where all of my little e-mail caches were, scattered to the winds on various servers. I can't remember all of the sites I went to. I can't remember how many of the vast multitude of Shoutcast stations I had bookmarked in Winamp. (For that matter, I'm missing about half of my former media library.)

So if you know me, and you are wondering why the hell I haven't been participating in whatever discussion/project/whatever-the-hell that I used to be doing, drop me a note here in the comments. (Not like I actually expect one will actually turn up, mind you. Hope beyond home and all that good rot.)

And you want to know the real bugger of it all?

I have a backup of my entire history, bookmarks, usernames, passwords, and all the other pieces of information that would let me completely resume my old presence... But I can't find the physical memo pad that I used to write down the location of said backup.

le sigh

A Minor Technical Malfunction

Unusually, this latest delay in my posting schedule has been due to some rather significant computer problems. Most of the time, my lack of blogging is solely due to a PEBE scenario. (Problem Exists Between Ears, a variation of the PEBKAC difficulty: Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair.) [Minor Edit: This acronym is now officially in the Urban Dictionary.]

Yet this time...

Facedesk. Serious, undiluted, without hesitation, repeated facedesk.

In mid-August, my hard drive decides to retroactively join the Heaven's Gate cult and commits suicide. Great, huge gngngnaaaarch-ch-ch-ch sounds as it gives up the ghost, magic smoke, flames, sparks, the ghost of Harry Caray singing "Take Me Out To The Ballgame"... While my computer never exactly stopped on a dime and gave me a nickel change, it at least could plod along with the better of them. Yet without that magical operating system, it suddenly became a paperweight bigger than my dog.

Okay. Fine. Not that big. But definitely bigger than my cat.

So. Fast forward 1 week until I have my paycheck in hand so I can buy a new hard drive. Install hard drive, install XP, install frequently-used programs, start installing infrequently-used programs...

pop

Huh?

And now magic smoke comes from my CPU. Friendly happy magic smoke. We all love that magic smoke, don't we? (No. Not that magic smoke, you drug-addled freaks.) Closer examination also reveals a deep-fried mobo as well as a dead power supply.

*headWALL* and repeat ad infinitum.

No computer. At all. Period.

By the fourth hour, I'm starting to go into significant withdrawal symptoms. Shaking hands, nervous glances over my shoulder, constantly muttering at my dead box, saying things like "Just one more website, man! That's all I need!", extreme paranoia, a tendency to try to click on top of people's faces to try to get them to expand on whatever they had just told me... It was pure misery. Suffering. Frustrated, Incorporated. Yet instead of getting murdered in my sleep for my insanity, we came up with a much better plan.

Between myself and my roommate, we gather about $700 over the next 6 weeks in order to buy a whole new computer. For us, that's a fairly significant chunk of change, and not one that can be taken lightly. So I started sniffing around and found the very nice folks at Micro Center, who then, after hearing my tale of woe, decided not to laugh at my pitiful existence.

Instead, they sold me this.

Don't tell my roommate how little I paid for it. I used the spare cash to get a new monitor, a better keyboard and trackball, a few stacks of DVD-R, some Flash keys... Well, you get the hint.

And after everything was done, then I went for a beer or few. I needed them.

And now, to eat something besides meatless and sauceless spaghetti for the first time in a month.