While the spring weather roller-coaster arrived here with it’s five minute weather changes running from blizzards to rain to sunshine and back again with afternoon tidal gushes of water, mud, and mushy snow my computer left for Pluto after succumbing to a nasty viral assailant. The Robins, who always have the bad fortune of showing up right before the last severe blizzard, are fairing better than my computer.
First up was some nasty little critter that rode in on a downloaded file (origins unknown) that decided the time was right to eat my hard drive in spite of having protection. I guess what goes for birth control also goes for virus protection, that being “nothing works 100% of the time”.
So it was off to one of the local computer shops for a salvage job. Lesson one, not all shops tech people are created equal, another familiar adage- “children shouldn’t play with knives” comes to mind. Lesson two, don’t assume that the shop you bought your computer from gives a rats a** about you, a previous customer. Lesson three, word of mouth in a small town will get you divorced almost as fast as it will put you out of business.
I guess I should be thankful that I got my computer back in one piece with all the data I really didn’t need and almost none of what I specifically asked to be saved. Lesson four, back up religiously. While my “Simm City” didn’t exactly look like Dresden after the bombing, I’ll be cleaning up some rubble for a bit.
Now I am dealing with nefarious ISP’s and phone companies who can’t seem to synchronize with one another in the “seamless” manner that we hear about in all the advertising. I suppose in the city this stuff all gets done that way but being “out in the sticks” apparently you still have to wait for the mule train to bring in your DSL supplies. In the meantime you send smoke signals, use Morse code and 56k dial up.
The up side is that I can only handle dial up for about five minutes before I start having fits and give up and go do things that I should be doing anyway. I’ve gotten all kinds of little chores done. I’ve gotten into this kind of cycle. As the snow melts back I go out and tend to whatever “winter detritus” has been revealed, I come back in to see if the weather page has downloaded a half hour later. If it has, I check it out and then I click the link to the satellite image and head up and tie a couple flies: a half hour later I come back to see what the satellite image looks like, then I head back out to see what’s melted out of the snow…
It’s scary. All these mini storms passing through, the air cluttered with bits and bytes and various signals on various frequencies, AIG and the White House are getting lynched and I have to watch it in slow motion!
