In which I don’t get excited and make things, because I’m really more of a theoretical thinker, but I do get excited and LEARN STUFF.
A week ago, I was depressed.
I’m unemployed. I’m worried about being able to get a job here. I don’t have a car and my income is so tight that buying a car seems problematic, and my dog is extremely geriatric so I’d feel bad about doing anything stressful to her like moving. I was sleeping all the time and drinking a lot and feeling useless, misplaced, weak, and without discipline.
Some friends pointed me to an awesome self-help book, the reading of which facilitated my getting my head on straight again, and from there I found the energy, desire, and inspiration to do the other things I need to do.
Long story short, I was using up all my energy telling myself I was lazy and pudgy and common, and feeling guilty about not getting things done, all while knowing that if I’d just walk or do yoga or meditate, because I totally know what I need to do, it would probably help me, but damn if I’m not too big a lump to even to do the things I know intellectually that I really more than ever need to do…
So I quit judging myself – and it was that fucking simple, srsly – and re-remembered that I have access to an inexhaustible well of love. Ta-da! No moar situational depression, anxiety, or panic attacks.
The mind really is a terrible thing. I shit you not.
Since I’m feeling interested again and I’ve got oodles of wonderful, wide-open free time, I’ve been feeding my head. I’ve watched a ton of TED Talks, including most of the newly posted ones and the majority of the ones tagged ‘inspiring.’ I heard from physicists, neurophysiologists, musicians, entrepreneurs, authors, and statisticians, among others.
If you have the time to click some of those links and watch the vids, DO IT. It’s wonderful and amazing to experience what happens to you when you expose your mind to people who love what they do and are really fucking good at it.
I found two free exercise programs online and started them on Monday. (You may have seen me complaining about my quads in my Twitter feed yesterday. zOMG, quads.) I’ve been doing cardio, too, which I traditionally dislike with a white-hot passion. I’d like to say it feels good, but I’d be lying: mostly this is just a nod toward research about bone density and load-bearing activities. Gah! Aging is so not for pussies.
I discovered the Makerbot 3D printer and spent hours learning all about HOW FUCKING AWESOME IT IS because it will totally change the world when people can print out things they need (including other printers) on demand. Imagine the huge reduction of mass manufacturing and expensive transport of stupid little tsotchkes – we’ll just download the patterns and print them out at home. The entire 3D printer community is geeked out, engaged, and on fire. It’s awesome and wonderful to behold people so into what they’re doing.
I had to take algebra twice in high school because maths have never been my strong suit. I get bummed when there’s a formula in whatever paper, article, or book I’m reading because I can’t even begin to parse what all those symbols mean, and I’d like to remedy that but I need remedial instruction. Well, guess what? There’s a free iTunes U high school algebra course, and, strangely, I’ve had a lot of fun whipping through it just for fun. I mean, hey, why not? I’ve got an abundance of that most precious of commodities: time.
I’m up to 446 flair at superuser because I actually am good at what I do, in spite of how low I was feeling about my skills a month ago. Yeah, baby.
I’m making lists of things I enjoy, things I’m good at, and things I want. They’re unfocused and soft but they’re helping anyway. I’m remembering what I used to think of as my purpose and letting it unfurl. I’m remembering that I have always balked at the idea of monetizing most of what I do, and I’m gently unpacking that somewhere in the back of my head while my attention is elsewhere.
I am also making friends like you would not believe; every time I leave the house someone else falls in love with me. (Yes, I know how that sentence reads, but it both lacks ego and is true so I’ll let it stand.) I’ve added six new phone numbers to my cell phone this week alone, and I’m getting these lovely gushing texts and voice mails like I won a Grammy or something and I haven’t even brushed my hair so it’s not like I did anything beyond making space for love.
Last night at open mic, a DJ friend of mine asked if I could build him a website on the cheap. I said I could, and we agreed to meet for coffee in the not too distant future. Then he said, “Dude, I could get you a lot of business from other DJs. They all need sites, but don’t want to drop $2000 to get one. If you could crank ’em out cheap, even if they all had the same layout, I could get you mad business for awhile.”
And I was all, sweet! There’s my Amma money!
Yeah. So. The point is that when you’re unemployed and have the time (and aren’t so depressed that all you consume is media likely to keep you that way) the Internet is FULL OF KICK ASS, FREE, BEAUTIFUL INFORMATION, INSPIRATION, AND EVEN WORK. Do you dig something, need something, want to learn something? IT’S OUT THERE. On the Internet.
Gawd, I simply cannot imagine there ever having been a better era to be alive in.
In which sitting around being passive isn’t working, so it’s time to get positive.
There are these two people I know. They’re awesome. They’re my friends. I love them. (They each possess some of the shiniest, thickest, healthiest hair you’ve ever seen in your life.) They sent me an email the other day suggesting that I read this cheesy self-help book. He said, “read this and then see what you can do,” and she said, “I know we’re all jaded about techniques, but this is one that has proven to us to have some value about it,” and since it was a free Kindle download, why not go ahead and read it?
Um, because it’s cheesy self-help crap and I’m so totally beyond that?
But these two people are verily the embodiment of teh awesome (plus it was free), so I downloaded the book and started to read it. And it was, of course, totally cheesy self-help crap, written at a forth grade reading level and filled with repetition, and I couldn’t figure out why such smart, deep people would be suggesting such material to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I thought, halfway through Chapter Two, I know all this. What the hell, they think I don’t know this?
And then it began to sink in. Sure, I know this, but I don’t know it. If I were living it, I wouldn’t be feeling so… bad. Useless. Lost. Pissed off.
The basic premise of the book is this: love yourself.
That’s it. Just… love yourself.
There’s a bunch of material pointing out the ways in which we don’t love ourselves, and some little exercises to help get the mind out of the way, but essentially it’s just a reminder that people who are inside-out are working too damn hard. Quit trying to get love/affirmation/acceptance from the outside world, and go back to the source: yourSelf.
Duh.
Every year I go and see my Sat Guru and every year I re-learn that I am love, and then a few months later I’ve forgotten it again.
I’ve really really forgotten it in the past couple of years, and the result has been directionlessness, dissatisfaction, negativity, guilt, irritation, and random waves of hellacious panic attacks that leave me feeling helpless and hopeless.
I spent the day reorganizing the inside of my head, pushing back the habits of the mind, and disabling my “I suck” soundtrack. My shoulders dropped about two inches as I let go of the stress.
Oh. Duh.
I don’t suck, I’m not stupid, there’s no reason to beat myself up for {insert whatever it is that I’m judging myself about}, everyone is cool, the world is cool, I love myself, I am love, it’s all groovy.
HOLY SHIT, BUT THE MIND IS A STONE-COLD NEGATIVE BITCH! I’m just sayin’. And I know this, have known it for years, but it’s so easy to identify with the mind and live there in judgment and then get all, “This sucks. The whole thing. All of it. Fuck these people, fuck this situation,” and stay there while still believing that you’re the awesome radiant being you want to be.
Hell. Literally. It’s hell.
Anyway, there’s also a focusing aspect to the book, so I’m compiling this list of Rando Things That Would Be Cool To Do. Incomplete and in no particular order, it currently looks like this:
- Travel to India.
- Stay/live in Amritapuri.
- Visit London.
- Become a flight attendant.
- Be free of panic and anxiety for good.
- Get a cruise ship gig.
- Vacation in Egypt.
- Be a full-time musician.
- Feel smart.
- Take piano lessons.
- Love exercise.
- Be free of debt.
- Have money.
- Hang out with inspiring, engaged people.
- Get divorced.
- Get paid to travel.
- Get more tattoos (particularly the karajishi I’ve wanted for, like, six years).
- Fix the bike and ride it instead of driving.
- Accept love without doubting its intention.
- Be the leader of the band.
- Get a job with great pay and a steep learning curve.
- See more old friends more often.
- Drop the self-doubt and regret thing.
- Record an album. My album.
- Do more spiritual practice. Want to do more spiritual practice.
- Quit being afraid of death: mine, my dog’s, my family members’.
- Celebrate pretty much everything.
- See more high-quality live music.
- Say yes more than no.
I think I’ll finally go get a passport next week. Why not be prepared, yeah? I’m not quite ready to do much else yet in the concrete sense, but at least I’m not sleeping all day and feeling stupid and guilty about it.
So, yeah. I guess the moral is that the truth is the truth, regardless of the source (even if it is way cooler from the East, with cute aphorisms instead of repetition). And P.S., your mind is a tool, not your identity. And P.P.S., your friends are freakin’ wonderful.
In which this website would be in fifth grade now, if it were human.
GOBLINBOX.COM is nine years old today.
It’s been on at least seven different servers. It’s been hand-coded, it’s been run on Movabletype and WordPress. It’s had ten different forums. There have been as many as eight different databases at a time. There have been innumerable themes and color schemes and layouts.
It has suffered multiple crashes and some pretty significant data loss. There are sub-folders filled with broken image galleries. I’ve been asked to remove material a half a dozen times by both friends and employers. It’s been hacked twice, it’s been served take-down orders thrice, and it nearly got me sued once.
At its peak, it was getting ten thousand unique hits each month (now it gets about 2k), was spidered, indexed, and botted within an inch of its life, and it used upwards of 90% of the server’s total bandwidth.
It has been the cause of my learning FrontPage, HTML, Dreamweaver, graphic design and slicing, CSS, DNS, PHP, server security, MySQL, legal crap, and a lot of social crap.
I’ve written here about tech, work, sci-fi, gadgets, books, media, death, sex, miscarriage, love, divorce, travel, loss, weather, panic and anxiety, surgery, spirituality, film photography, knitting, and music – and there are even some pretty good recipes.
I’ve learned that some people will bitch at me for writing about them, and that other people will bitch at me for not writing about them. I’ve learned that there’s an awful lot of stuff I can’t write about, but that I can still somehow manage to convey what I need to convey.
Friends and family keep up with me through this website. I’ve made lots of new friends through this website. Some of them are old friends now, some of them dropped off the Internet, some of them I now know in real life.
Many of the blogs I’ve followed over the years are gone now. People are always announcing sabbaticals, or deleting their sites, or drifting away quietly. I’ve never announced a break, and never even felt the desire to do so. I love this website, and I really mean it when I say Here’s to another nine years!
When I’ve needed it most, I’ve received tremendous love and support here, and I truly cherish that. Thank you, all who come to visit, each and every one of you, old or new. I mean it. Even if you don’t comment.
If you want, you can take a trip with me down memory lane and look at the Internet archive entries. Remember when the site was orange? When it was purple? Those crazy Xmas themes I used to build? Hah!
GOBLINBOX.COM is nine years old today. Nine! Nine.
In which I flail around a bit more because apparently I’m a bit of a moron.
When you’re fourteen, you go to high school. That’s just what you do; everybody knows this. When you’re eighteen, you go to college. After college, you go to work and strive to pay off your student loans.
Eventually, you meet someone and form an alliance that involves bodily fluids at the least, and generally laundry and motor vehicle titles as well.
If you’re a breeder, you then proceed to breed. The expectation is so pervasive that you probably take a few stabs at it even if you don’t really want to. It’s just what you do.
After that it’s less clear what’s supposed to happen, or when, until the age of 65, at which point you’re supposed to be able to stop working. Beyond accumulating objects and thickening dramatically about the middle, there really isn’t a very clear action plan for people between, say, 30 and 65.
Hi! My name is Mush, I’m 41, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing!
I’m freaking out because I’m divorced with debt and no assets, and I have no job, no savings, no retirement fund, no car, no belongings, and no health insurance. A quick look at my UI paperwork confirms that I am mere months away from becoming a financial burden on my family/society. I have a lot of debt. I have no great skills or talents beyond a quick mind and a decent singing voice, and neither of those things have ever particularly made me much money.
I guess I’m supposed to be working a day job, engaging in hobbies on the side, and saving money for my old age. Sadly, I am not particularly good at this, and require many and varied vacations to keep me sane.
I am of a generation that thinks it should be happy more than responsible.
Right now, I’m having a crisis. I’m wondering if I should move so that I can find a day job… except that I don’t really want to move. Hell, I don’t even really want a day job – I want income. I have friends who fill my head with talk about doing music for a living. I have the idea that maybe I’m not finding a day job because it’s time for me to make money some other way. I have years and years of exposure to alternative ways of thinking that tell me sometimes it’s important to follow happiness rather than logic. I also live in a culture full of self-indulgent fuck-ups, so I have to consider that maybe the happiness-before-all-else approach lacks depth and creates debt. I also have a heart full of doubts about the kind of person I actually am because it seems to me that if I were the kind of person who lived in the city and gigged a lot, I’d already be doing that and clearly I’m not. I haven’t lived in a city for a looooong time. Honesty compels me to admit that I want to think of myself as a city girl, but I am not, in actual point of fact, able to call myself a city girl. Anyway, blah blah blah, I need to figure out if I’m going to stay here or go somewhere else, and to that end here are some bullet points, because who doesn’t love bullet points?
I should stay here because:
- I can afford to pay off my debt and travel. Well, when I have a job, that is.
- I’m in a good band, with good gigs lined up. I’m gaining recognition.
- I have friends, family, community.
- As the childless spinster in the family, it’s basically my duty to be here for G’ma.
- There’s no good reason to throw out the life I just spent the last three years building.
I should move away because:
- There’s no work here.
- There is greater chance of doing more music in a major metro area.
- Challenge. Pace. Exposure. Art! Culture!
- The life I’ve built here is common and can be duplicated pretty much anywhere, really.
I think that I don’t want to move away, but I can’t tell if I sincerely don’t want to move away or if I’ve convinced myself of the overwhelming difficulty of doing so and/or the likelihood of my failing to accomplish anything but abject poverty and fatigue.
In other words, am I failing to appreciate what I’ve got here? Am I romanticizing city life?
Yes, and yes. I’m playing four blues festivals this summer, and I’m meeting lots of great players as I get around more. I can get any old job if I have to, and it’s not like I’ve ever really been career-oriented anyway – if I was, I’d have a better skill set by now.
In the city I’d be bitching about loneliness, commute times, and constant poverty. Cities are fun when you vacation there; when you live there it’s high rent, late busses, and so much social churn that it takes a great deal of time and effort to meet the right people. You’re working 40 hours a week just to cover rent and utilities and your fucking debt settlement program, and you find that every week you’re a little more tired and a little less likely to go out and meet musicians. (When I lived in San Francisco, everyone I did meet, on those rare occasions when I had the energy to go out, was just trying to save up enough money to move away.) If you lack discipline, you end up buying all that cute shit you see all over the place to pad your nest with, and you never take another vacation again. Five years later, you still have no equity, no savings, and you could have stayed in your grandmother’s attic for $150 a month and at least gotten to play some blues festivals. Your boyfriend is still a stoner because all of your boyfriends are stoners, you’re like a goddamned stoner magnet, and don’t forget that wherever you go there you are.
Or maybe not. Maybe you move to the city, get a job, meet awesome people, and have a gig in a couple of months. Maybe you’re so engaged and challenged and invigorated that you don’t actually just hole up in your apartment when you’re not doing your day job, maybe you finally blossom because you have access to the things you need. Maybe you finally meet a nice vegetarian Hindu boy, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Maybe it’s rural and small town living that makes you so weird, and your gut desire to get back into the city is a real impulse and not a daydream and it’s just a goddamned shame that it’s taken you this long to even be able to seriously consider it.
Being alone means that nothing keeps me anywhere; I could try anything I wanted.
Of course, there’s the question of where. Portland? Seattle? Chicago? DC? New York? And the question of how much: I don’t have any savings right now. I could probably move to Portland on a couple hundred bucks. New York would require, what, fifteen hundred minimum? Not to mention that not all cities are created equal; after you’ve been to Chicago and New York, most left coast cities barely qualify for the description.
Except I don’t think I want to move. I want to go on an extended vacation, but I can’t afford to because I don’t have a goddamned job.
And then there are the things I know about myself: I’m not particularly driven. When I have the time, space, and resources to do stuff, I don’t do it. One can only blame lack of stimulation so much before she has to admit she’s fucking lazy by nature. Right now I’m not getting my CCNA and I’m not working out and I’m not playing guitar and I’m not writing and I’m not meditating. I didn’t do those things when I was a housewife, I didn’t do those things the last time I was unemployed and had free time, and why would I be any different somewhere else?
But there’s no work here and I need a job! I have bills to pay!
Gawd! I am having such a hard time figuring out what I want to do, and where I want to do it. I couldn’t possibly waffle any more than I am. Why do I have to be such a fucking Libra all the time?!
In which I can stay up all night if I want to, because I have nothing to do during the day.
Yesterday I watched TV and ate a burrito. That was my entire contribution to the world. Srsly.
Last night I left the house at 8 o’clock, picked up the Wolf, and went to Barnaby’s for open mic. I spent most of the evening sitting on the couch in the back playing with my iPod, but I did go sing a blues song with a couple of the Feedback boys. My voice isn’t really doing anything cool this week because of The Cold, but it was fun to sit in.
After open mic, the group migrated to Ming Court. People played pool. I read and had a couple of drinks.
After pool, there was poker. We drove to the afterhours party, but it turned into naptime instead. (Seriously. There were three people asleep on the couch. Adorable.) The Wolf and I went to Shari’s and had omelets; as we were finishing up his cell rang: poker was back on.
I didn’t play poker. I took a nap!
I got to bed at five this morning.
Anyway.
In which there’s more about my attempt to earn the Lazy Girl Of The World crown!
This is a list of things I have NOT accomplished as of right this very minute:
- laundry
- visiting the WorkSource office
- playing guitar
- building a new template for this site
- contacting Washington eCycle
- taking the old clothes to charity
- cleaning my brother’s truck
- quitting smoking
- ripping Rocky Horror for Lannie
- going to the store for fava beans and lemons
- yoga
- exercise
- starting a diet to lose the pudge I’ve gained since being unemployed
- knitting
- sewing
- studying for the CCNA
- film photography
- making the bed
- taking the dog to the vet for her checkup
You gotta admit, that’s a whole lotta shit not goin’ on.
On the job front, I broke down and crafted a new résumé–one targeting office instead of tech positions–and sent it out a few times.
And The Cold has mellowed from zomg-I’m-getting-walking-pneumonia to a mere cold.
Anyway.
In which there are germs.
I have a rotten chest cold. It sucks. I don’t like it.
I’m also pretty sure that nearly everyone is way cooler than me because goblinbox.com is gonna be nine in two weeks and I still don’t have a book deal.
That is all.
In which it was really exciting there for a minute, but then my hopes were dashed.
I found a job under Tech Support on craigslist. It looked good. I scrolled down to the bottom of the page and clicked the link to apply for it. After I finished the online quiz – five fairly interesting but slightly dated tech questions I answered with the help of my boyfriend, Google – but before I was able to upload my résumé, my netbook halted and I had to reboot. I tried to finish the job application afterward, but the site wouldn’t let me back in nor would it let me start over.
Fast forward a week, and I get the following email:
Your name and email came through on our JobVite system notifying me that you applied for our Solutions Center Engineer position and have passed our initial essay quiz; however, your information is incomplete in our system. If you are still interested in this position can you please complete your profile on our site or send me a copy of your resume?
Oh boy, can I! I get all excited and email my résumé. It’s a telecommuting job; I’d get to work from home. The main company’s in Seattle and I’d have to go there for training, but that’s no biggie. Tech support from home! Talk about an excellent solution to my employment/location issues! Before the day was out I had two phone interviews scheduled for today.
I went and read through the employer’s entire site. I learned they’re solvent and growing and in desperate need of technicians. I even joined their forum and answered a bunch of support queries. For free.
I went to bed early and got up early. By nine o’clock this morning I had dressed, eaten, and even made my bed. I had a mug of tea and I was sitting in front of my computer with my Bluetooth headset on, ready to go.
First thing the caller says is that I need to be in front of a computer, ideally with a headset on, so that I can search for answers. Since I hadn’t been told any of this, I was pretty thrilled with myself for being so insightful. Then he proceeds to start off with a question I don’t know the answer to (“Name at least five ways programs can autostart with Windows, in addition to the Startup folder”), followed by two more (“What does it mean to back up the registry?” and “Are you an expert in msconfig?”) to which I have to answer, “I don’t know,” and “No, I’m currently not.”
There are five ways Windows starts applications? Okay. I didn’t know that. I figured there were two: launch the app at startup, and do not launch the app at startup. I mean, an app’s either in the startup list or it isn’t, right? I told the interviewer that while I was furiously googling “how does Windows launch applications?” and giving great phone (“Typically, when I’m looking something up, I chat with the customer so they don’t have to listen to dead air, but in this context I don’t really have any small talk,” I say. The interviewer says, “We just put them on hold,” which tells me they don’t give a shit about customer service and are probably metric-oriented. Hmm).
I’m not a registry jock; I’ve spent ten years working for ISPs telling people to take their virus-infested shit someplace else for removal. I’m in my own computer’s registry maybe twice a year, and in customers’ registries, like, six times in the entire past decade. Pretty much every employer I’ve ever had has considered registry edits to be a liability nightmare and consequently I haven’t learned much on the topic.
I tell the interviewer all this, admit that I don’t believe that I understand the gist of his last question, and then qualify that I can learn whatever I need to know pretty much right away. He brusquely tells me that I can’t. “There’s a three-day training for this position, and it presupposes a deep knowledge of registry issues,” he says. “To remove viruses that are so new AV apps aren’t defending against them, you need to understand how programs start with Windows and cut them out surgically.”
Ah. It’s a full-time virus removal job. Yuck.
While the job description does say, “Troubleshooting Windows XP platform to registry level,” it doesn’t emphasize that quite enough, IMO: there’s a bunch of other stuff on there that I’m actually really good at. I think it should say, “We do massive quantities of zero-day virus removal and we need registry phreaks. Your apprehension of TCP/IP is pretty much irrelevant to us because people call their ISPs for that shit.”
The interviewer somehow managed to make me feel stupid – I’m not! I p0wn support! – when he said, “Well, we really need people who actually know how Windows works, so I see no reason to continue this evaluation. I thank you for your time–”
“Your job description,” I interrupted, “says that you’re looking for responsible phone techs with networking skills and the ability to set up and troubleshoot LANs and peripherals. But what I’m hearing now is that you actually just do remote virus removal all day? Is this correct?” He affirms. I really don’t want to remove viruses for a living, but I’d been really excited yesterday and now I feel uncomfortable and belittled, like I’m wasting his time when his company called me for an interview. He starts to conclude the conversation again. I childishly interrupt again and invite him to have a nice day. The interview terminates.
Oh, well. At least I don’t have to remove viruses for a living.
In which I somehow manage to fill my days but I don’t feel like I’m actually doing anything.
Just a few rando things before the video:
- My netbook is all better after the rebuild. Yay!
- I sorta-kinda have a boyfriend, but we never see each other because we both gig, he’s on a pretty committed night schedule, and neither of us can entertain in our places of residence.
- I’ve gotten a response from a job application! Unfortunately, it’s for a part-time support job on the other side of the state and it only pays about a buck an hour over minimum wage.
- I ran out of business cards for my rockstar persona, so I ordered more today. I figured I needed them, since I’ll be doing about five blues festivals with Coyote Kings this summer. VERY EXCITING!
- G’ma won’t stop buying Purina; it’s cheap and I think she objects to paying twice as much for dog food. I object to Purina because it’s essentially non-digestible (the “crude protein” on the label is ground up non-food animal parts) and does weird things having to do with elimination to my dog that you really don’t want to hear about. I am now buying Iams myself and leaving it lying around in an effort to keep Bindu’s colon from falling out of her ass. (Yes, I fed and bought food for my own dog for over a decade; I just don’t get the opportunity to do so any longer.) I did get G’ma to quit giving Bindu canned food every damned day, though!
- I had my acrylic nails removed last week, for two reasons: I feel guilty paying for fills when I’m unemployed, and I wanted to maybe play a little guitar. My nailbeds still feel REALLY WEIRD.
- You should check out this picture of my breakfast.
Okay, since you’ve all been such good boys and girls, now we can watch some television!
Last Saturday, I played with the Coyote Kings at the Ice Harbor brew pub in Kennewick, WA. Below is some footage from the third set of a song Rob wrote for me to sing, called “You Don’t Like (What’s Goin’ On)”:
I sound all right, for a pudgy Irish chick, don’t you think?
In which it’s that time of year again!
About every year, Windows gets reinstalled on my personal computer.
This is not because I enjoy reinstalling Windows, oh no. It’s because it shits the bed about every twelve months and has to be reinstalled.
My darling Eee PC 900HA (my baby, my littlest, my daily driver) started hanging ultra mega hard* about a week ago, and for various reasons – namely drunkenness and debauchery, plus a lot of gigging – I didn’t get it fixed right away.
My brother took a look at it and agreed with me that the issue wasn’t, in fact, hardware failure (it’s so great to have a geek next door!) which was lovely because of course the thing’s a month out of warranty.
I could only tweet from my phone because my iPod Touch battery died since I couldn’t plug it into the netbook. My Twitter, blog, and Facebook presence suffered mightily, and don’t even get me started on my lack of coherent job search. I also failed to help a friend’s friend with his computer shopping, missed a bunch of FB memes of varying hilarity, am way behind on my email, and didn’t manage to properly thank PJ for the unexpected parcel full of wool yarn and bath salts.
My Internet withdrawal finally got to the part with the DTs and drooling, so today I borrowed from my brother, who is awesome, a giant external hard drive and his laptop.
Right now I’m backing up my data onto the external drive while I apply for about six jobs via the laptop. (I’m afraid that one of the “jobs” was a bogus phishing attempt and I gave them my fucking email address and phone number before I figured it out. Creeps! A pox on their houses!)
When the backup completes I’ll wipe the Eee PC clean, format it, partition it, install Windows, download service packs, download updates, install applications, and then transfer my data back onto it. And then? Then I’ll have normal, regular, working, non-crashing, non-OMFG-THIS-IS-SO-PISSING-ME-OFF! access to the Internet, yea verily, and it shall Be Good!
*Geeky Details: I installed .NET the day before the issue became apparent; not sure if that’s related. Netbook booted up fine, boot booster was running, all good. Windows loaded, apps loaded. Used the thing and it would just… hang. No drive activity at all. Forever, until hard-booted. Uptime varied from a few minutes to half an hour. I checked my tools and it seemed there was a lot of services.exe activity, but there was also more ‘net activity than I’d normally expect. Virus? Full scans found no viruses or rootkits. After each hang, it would reboot as if it hadn’t been turned off improperly (save once, the second time, when scandisk told me it had had to repair a bunch of kernel files). If I turned it on and didn’t launch any applications, it would run almost indefinitely, but all the apps I ran – Firefix, iTunes, Calibre, even Process Explorer – would cause it to just seize up. It hasn’t seized once during the hour-plus process of copying files to the external drive. A registry cleaner app told me my registry was a hot tranny mess. I blame Canada.
VSCO
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4 random books from my Library!
