Shokai the Nerd

Alright, enough of the flood talk already. Miraculously, although Rita was the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico, and the third strongest hurricane observed in the Atlantic, no one seems to have died from its landfall. The storm is now stalling over the lower Mississippi Valley, so it's likely to bring more flooding downriver to New Orleans, but while I sympathize, and am outraged by the government's prior inaction, it's time to move on and blog about other things.

I played the nerd today. I bought this new computer late last Sunday afternoon, and while I had time to set it up and get on line, I really didn't have time to do too much else with it all week. So this morning, I came into the office with a big cup of Joe, sat down, and was the computer geek all day.

My first challenge was setting up Outlook, so I wouldn't have to get all of my email on the Web. I entered the 25-digit Windows product-validation code when prompted, but the computer kept telling me that it wasn't a valid number. I kept trying and re-checking (was that a capital one, or the letter "i?") until it finally dawned on me that I was entering the Windows operating system code, not the Microsoft Works code (wrong CD).

That seemed to be the breakthrough, and soon I had my email client up and running, the Windows office package, and all the various virus protectors, spyware sentinels and other cyber prophylactics required these days.
Then I rolled up my sleeves for the real challenge - the old broke-down dinosaur in the other room. My old computer still had all my old digital photographs, including pictures of my trips to Bahamas, Corsica, Florence and Budapest, plus sundry holidays, hikes, and other highlights of the last few years. And a boatload of music files, downloaded programs and all of my email and contacts since June 2001.

Well, I fixed it! I put the system recovery disk in the CD drive and started it up, and instead of slipping back into Safe Mode, it started right up - it even seemed to be operating better than it had been for a while; the convalescence seems to have done it well. I didn't waste any time retrieving the most important items, and I immediately started burning the digital photos to disk. I gained confidence as the afternoon passed, and I was eventually able to harvest about everything I needed.

So now I have two computers - one in the office and one in the meditation room. That's sort of like me - a little extravagant, definitely impractical, and very idiosyncratic. One could argue that I didn't need to have bought this new computer, but instead should have put more effort into fixing the old one - like I did today - but I have no regrets. The old dinosaur was barely limping along on Windows ME and as much time as I spend at my computer, I didn't need the aggravation. Maybe I'll network the two, and let them talk among themselves and keep each other company while I'm at work.