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Thursday, October 09, 2003

upgrading, or an exercise in frustration

The lack-of-sleep haze from Tuesday night has finally worn off, after a good eight hours last night. I'm still working on getting used to the new computer, though (hmm, sounds like a good excuse to sit around at the computer half the day....). We were the last people on the planet to upgrade to Windows 95, just before Windows 98 came out. Then we got Windows 98 late too, and now we have WIndows XP which, if the pattern holds true, will become seriously outdated within the next seven days, all because we've finally upgraded to it. Regardless, it is extremely nice to be able to start up my computer without a series of error messages about bad sectors, and to be able to run it for more than two hours without The Blue Screen Of Death, or without the keyboard stubbornly deciding to stop communicating with whatever it's supposed to communicate with -- generally in the middle of a really good scintillating IM conversation. It's worth the hassle of having to make this program fit my kinks -- for example, this font has got to go. Ick. Just as soon as I'm done with this entry.


In order to facilitate moving our documents, music, etc., from our old system to the new one, we bought a cheapo $100 external CD-RW drive when we bought the new computer. It was the process of getting this to actually function that took probably half the night on Tuesday. I swear the directions for this machine were stolen from engrish.com. Not only did they make no sense, but they also told almost nothing about how to actually use the thing. It was as if someone had made up a set of generic poorly-translated directions that would work for a new blow dryer, a compact imported car, a power drill, or a gas barbecue -- take your pick -- and then mistakenly put them in the package for this CD burner. Surely there are enough native-English-speaking people in China and other foreign countries who could be hired by manufacturers to make sure that packaging and instructions are both comprehensible and useful for English speakers? Or perhaps not.


Once I finally made that work, mostly by divine intervention I think, everything went pretty smoothly, and before I knew it, I was looking at that bizarrely-plastic-silver-boombox-looking Windows XP layout, having officially joined the rest of humanity in its susceptibility to modern viruses (our operating system was so old that your average pimply virus-writing hack was born after it was. Well, not quite, but close). I still would love to figure out how to make Outlook Express figure out how to import my old emails. I had backed them up ages ago, when we got a second 3.2G hard drive (ha! remember when that was a HUGE hard drive? I do) because our main 3.2G hard drive was too full. Now I have them on a CD, and I can't make Outlook Express see them. I am an obsessive-compulsive email-saver; it's extremely unsettling (and has been since I backed them up) to have no access to the history of my life for the last seven years. And I also REALLY miss my ergonomic keyboard, although it had its problems so I don't want to hook it up to this machine. I have a new one coming from eBay. I don't even have a wrist rest, and I can feel the CTS coming on as I type this.


Anyway. In other news of the day...


Those of you coming to this diary for the first time from a weight loss ring might be surprised to find no reference to my weight at all. Well, here. In the last two weeks I have lost one pound -- and I lost that two weeks ago, and it's periodically been lost and found since then. I started out at 194 pounds (which isn't as fat as it sounds, since I'm just a shade under 5'9" and very dense), and right now I'm sitting at 174. I'm on my way to 150 pounds, and now that my husband is home from the fire he was working on for a week and a half, and the kids and I aren't driving all over the countryside and eating half our meals in restaurants, as well as having junk-food parties, to distract ourselves from missing him, I'm back on track.


Also, homeschooling is going well. LT and I are studying Arthurian legends, and he is writing a puppet-show script of Star Wars Episode 7, since George Lucas isn't going to make it. So far the plot is a dread secret, but he has allowed it to leak out that Luke has 20 Death Stars and that he (Luke, not my 7-yo son) has made 100 double-ended light sabers. I'll keep you posted so that you can line up 200 people deep and camp on our street when the premiere (where lemonade and brownies will be available for sale, I am to understand) happens. ;-)

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