Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Humility and perseverance

We all play games with numbers at some point. Most often the juggling is for selfish gain of one variety or another. No honey, we can easily afford a new (insert name of man toy here). Or the ever popular "I really needed this pair of shoes for that wedding we have next week. None of the sixty pair I have match my outfit."

So I should not have been surprised when my huge box of computer parts came via UPS and I sat down for assembly that I swore would take only two hours and it turned in to a week of misery and discontent. What should have been a simple plug and play operation involving an hour or so of assembly and a pot of coffee worth of software configuration evolved in to a mire of incompatible bios settings and several incomprehensible apparitions of the famous Microsoft blue screen of death. For those of you who cut their teeth on windows 98, which had the stability of an anorexic teenage girl with an absent father and low self esteem, you might take that news in stride. Sadly I must report that although you may believe like I that those horrid error messages went the way of zip drives I can assure you they are alive and well and lurking just under the surface of windows XP pro ready to pounce upon those of us stupid enough to challenge new technology without having done a hardware upgrade in seven years.

Dejected as I was dear reader I stuck with it and am happy to report as of this writing that I believe I have exorcised the demons that lie beneath and will within an hour be able to machine gun Nazi soldiers by the time the sun sets. That is of course if I can get the few chores done my wife asked me to do today that I blew off to finish the build project. I am very anxious to take the new machine out for a spin but in fairness to her I have to attend to the chores first.

Its OK though. She said it should only take me an hour or so.

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