I’m taking a short break from reading William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! While it’s a wonderful, poetic book — absolutely Faulkner at his best — that doesn’t exactly translate into an easy read, and I find I’ve been making excuses not to pick it up again. In fact, I haven’t been reading much of anything at all, and that can’t be good for me. So, after reading Emma Straub’s entertaining and insightful interview-essay on the appreciation of genre fiction (found via Neil Gaiman’s online journal) — and after I moped around Barnes and Noble for half an hour last night — I decided The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub was the way to go. So far, no complaints.
Month: February 2002
When all your past experience tells you that you’re an idiot, it’s probably not a good idea to start playing fast and loose with your HTML. For over an hour I couldn’t get Blogback to work, nor could I figure out why it wasn’t working, and finally, when I somehow got it to work again, my weblog was taken over by error messages telling me that my version of Blogback had expired or was pirated, and at the very least should be deleted. Such is life. I’ve switched temporarily to a commenting system from uigui.net, and although customizable features like re-sizing would be nice, it does seem to be working. Leave a comment, why don’t you? Stop for a minute and say hello.
So my attempts to create a Windows boot disk on my office computer fell through, and whatever it is that I did create failed to work, possibly because all I have to work with is a copy of the Windows 2000 CD left by my predecessor. I should have known something was up when it had trouble copying to the disks I brought with me, but then again if I knew what I was doing I wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with. When things like this happen, when a computer crashes and goes dead to the world, it’s an unwelcome reminder of just how computer-ignorant I am. I know how certain programs work, I recognize some terms, and I can navigate the web pretty easily. But in the greater scheme of things I haven’t got a clue. Hopefully tech support does.
Never let it be said that life is not full of surprises. It’s a little after ten o’clock at night, and I’m the last place I expected to be: at work. Not actually working, of course, but hunched over the keyboard in my office while outside in the hall, floor polishers whir and janitors talk amongst themselves from one end of the corridor to the other. See, at home, my computer crashed. I tried to upload some rinky-dink midi conversion software, because I can’t actually play any instruments but I have these other songs stuck in my head and I’ve been trying to figure out which notes I’ve been humming lately. After much trouble, I ended up restarting my computer, and I wound up with error messages across my screen telling me that I need to reinstall Windows. I came here to try and find a boot disk, because I am apparently too stupid to have made one for my own use, and because everything else Dell tech support suggested failed to work or get me beyond “Error Starting Program” and an otherwise empty desktop. But all I have here is the Windows 2000 CD, and while creating a boot disk from that probably isn’t terribly complicated, it’s getting late, I don’t need to use my home computer tonight, and I have no blank disks handy, it would seem. Besides, I think the janitors are getting restless.
I will say this much: technical support can be awful, as recent experience has taught me, but the guy on the phone at Dell was friendly and courteous, and their menu was intuitive and easy to navigate. That’s important when you’re in Panic Mode, like I was when I first called. When they don’t have the information you need, or can’t fix the problems you’re facing, it’s at least nice to know it isn’t because they don’t care.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you, because I didn’t. Here, then, is “A Pocketful of Penis”, lyrics written in a fit of boredom by yours truly and recorded with members of the Penn State Monty Python Society, who assure me that the rest of our CD, Sex, Drugs, and Graham Spanier, is really much, much better that this track lets on, and that I should be a good boy and go lie down now. We’ll be performing this and other original pieces again sometime in mid-April, and if you’re really desperate for attention you can write us and ask for a copy of the CD. We only hurt the ones we love.