Do Not Adjust Your Set

So my computer decided it couldn't take the heat anymore (literally), and kicked the proverbial bucket. In order to fully comprehend the impact this has had on me, let me tell you about my computer.

My computer is named Deep Thought. It was named after the second most powerful computer in the Universe (according to Douglas Adams). It was most definitely not the second most powerful computer in... well anywhere except maybe the room it was in, and only then if there were less than two other computers present. It was, however, a huge improvement on my previous computer, which I had dubbed The Millenium Falcon. The MF was a hunk of junk. State of the art when we bought it, sure, in ... 1990? Something like that? 2GB hard drive, 33.6k dial up modem, ran Windows 95... Took about two hours to download one song, and even then you could only store about twenty on the thing before it began acting like a constipated elephant.

So when I got my first job, wage-slaving it at Toys R Us at 16, I saved up and bought myself a brand spankin' new computer. 80GB hard drive, Windows XP when it was still the New Thing, DVD drive and CD+RW drive... Not a super fancy video card or sound card, but enough at the time to do what I wanted it to do.

That computer has been with me for just about, oh... six years now? It moved to Montreal with me. It moved back to Moncton with me two years later. It's had parts taken out, put back in, it's had Windows reinstalled and all kinds of things have gone wrong with it. For a while now it's been ailing, the motherboard wasn't quite what it used to be and I think that reinstalling a maybe not-so-legit copy of Windows on it wasn't quite a smart thing to do (I blame the ex-boyfriend for that, I told him to use my copy but nooo, that wasn't good enough for him... But that's another story). So it's been stuck on Service Pack 1, with no Windows updates available because it wouldn't clear the genuine software verification, I couldn't run more than two programs at once without everything slowing way down and some programs would just not run at all. If I needed to restart the computer, I had to shut it all the way down, power it off and unplug it, leave it alone for about a half hour and then maybe it would come back on if it felt like it. So instead I just left it on. All the time.

So when I got home last week and found it powered off, alarm bells started blaring in my mind. And sure enough, no amount of trying would get my poor computer to power back on.

It kinda sucked for timing, too, cause I'd been meaning to blog about a bunch of things that had been happening that week, and now all the pictures are stuck on that hard drive. My mom gave me her computer, which is in much better shape than Deep Thought was and is now purring happily in my living room, but - and let me stress the importance of this - I have no files on this thing. No music. No pictures. No saved text files with appointment times, bookmarks, resumes, what have you.

I feel almost naked, and I am going into severe music withdrawal.

So the point of all this is, until I can get my hard drive slaved to this computer, I can't write about all the stuff I wanted to write about. So let's just pretend there are some pretty pictures here of the hat I made then frogged, the new yarn I got, the scarf I'm making for a coworker, the baby hat I'm halfway done with, the hermit crabs from the beach, the necklace I bought at the market...

Or better yet, I'll save all those for a future post. How's that?


Oh, and PS. Deep Thought will not go unremembered. My friends and I are planning to take it apart and use the innards for art.