Peace and Tranquility

My home computer has kicked the bucket. It has joined the digital choir invisible.

At first I thought it was pining for the fjords, since it had failed to boot on numerous occasions before. But in each of those previous circumstances, it came to life on the second or third time I pushed the button. On Friday, I pushed the button with increasing Pavlovian desperation over a period of hours without ever receiving positive reinforcement. It was quite utterly and thoroughly dead.

This is not a huge disaster; everything is backed up in the cloud (thanks to the good folks at Carbonite). But it IS a royal pain in the Jeffries Tube. After all, it's not as if my calendar has yawning gaps where I could easily pencil in a day or two of hardware analysis plus a few dozen hours of software reinstalls. It's not as if I'm looking for excuses to further isolate myself from polite society. In fact, I think I'd rather prefer to spend my running in Waterton or riding in Deer Creek Canyon...and enjoying the company of the athletes who are out rejoicing in the early Spring weather.

But no. I spent most of the weekend dealing with the consequences of motherboard mortality. Not much fun.

[Interlude: Why is "choir" pronounced "kwyer," instead of "cho-ear"?]

I had a decision to make. Should I try to reanimate the dead box by applying scientific troubleshooting techniques that might awaken my dormant IT skills? Or should I go into debt to purchase a brand new computer, knowing full well that my employment situation is tenuous at best? Or...should I coerce some youngster into teaching me how to do email and banking on my smart phone, while deflecting any word processing or graphics tasks into after-hours work on my office laptop?

None of those options sounded appealing. I decided instead to go ahead and convert my video editing workstation into a daily-use computer. I had hoped to keep it isolated from potential virus problems and the general software bloat that happens to cloud-connected machines...but it's not that great of a video workstation anyway. (It takes far too long to render files for DVD burning.) If my everyday usage renders it unsuitable for my media work, then I suppose I can always go buy a new system at that point. For now, I'm going to try to get by on a single computer.

I went online and found that MicroCenter had a USB hard drive docking station that I could use to transfer data from the dead computer's disks to the working PC...assuming the disks weren't the reason for the machine's demise in the first place. Their website said that orders placed online would be available for pickup in 18 minutes, so I placed my order and headed across town.

Arriving after a 30-minute commute, I knew I had made a mistake when I saw that the store's parking lot was empty. Of course; Easter Sunday. I should've been able to figure that out -- after all, the reason I had time to drive across town was that my swim practice was cancelled because the pool was closed for the holiday.

Still, the MicroCenter shopping cart site should've said "Your order will be ready in 18 minutes...UNLESS WE LIED ABOUT BEING OPEN during the time you're planning to visit."

Sigh. Oh well, at least I'm still enjoying my new car. I was able to listen to a bunch of good BTO songs during the long and unproductive drive.

One other quick story to relate:

I was recently at a restaurant where an older woman at a nearby table started choking. Her table-mates reacted quickly, as did several other folks from the restaurant. The man she was with performed the Heimlich maneuver a couple of times without success...but then finally dislodged the offending relleno (or whatever.) The entire incident probably too less than a minute, and the woman was fine. Paramedics showed up within another couple of minutes to check her out, and it appeared that they declared her 100% healthy.

What impressed me was how many people jumped up to help. By the time I noticed the activity, there were already folks standing in line to give the Heimlich a shot if the first guy hadn't been successful. It reminded me of this scene:




Anyway, it made me wonder if this technique (unknown anywhere prior to 1974) is now universally understood...or if it's just been propagated throughout the universe of Mexican restaurant patrons? Would the same line of helpful Heimlichers queue up if I choked on a baguette at a French restaurant? Or would the folks there simply mime the act of dialing 911 from inside a glass box? If you inhaled a wad of kelp at a sushi restaurant, would they dislodge it with karate chops?

Which reminds me; I'm scheduled to renew my CPR certification in a couple of weeks. I'll let you know how that goes. In the meantime, I'll be busy with all the tasks involved in transferring everything to a new computer, as well as the remainder of my home organization project. I'm also getting some old home videos transferred to DVD. If I happen to find any good clips within those archives, I might try to get them posted. And of course, it's time to get serious about my triathlon training, too. There's just not enough time to get everything done.

But at least I'm in no danger of becoming bored, right? It's definitely time to shift into summer mode, so let's all enjoy the season, and have a great day!