Thursday, June 14, 2007

A post instead of the post I meant to write

I don't know about most bloggers, but I generally think about my posts for some time before I write them. Yesterday's post was an exception, since it was really a response to the tabloid-style front page on yesterday's paper. It was also a result of me suddenly realizing why Vince McMahon had been briefly mentioned on CNN throughout the day on Tuesday, or why his name was one of the top search engine strings on that day. Plus I thought it was pretty funny that our little corner of the world was chosen for this stunt - though other people had a different take.

Yesterday's planned post was to be bumped up to today, and it was going to be on one of two topics: either Compost and what it means to me (keeping with both the gardening theme and the employment theme, with a little political side-note thrown in), or Patience (my greatest strength and my greatest weakness.) But it's not going to be on either of those.

No, it's not going to be on either of those because yesterday my computer was extra-crappy and extra-crashy, so much so that I intentionally interrupted it during a reboot to force it into "Safe Mode", a dumbed-down version of Windows that runs without all the background crap going on. This allowed me to do two things that I can never do in the normal Windows 98 SE environment: run Scandisk, and run Disk Defragmenter.

Scandisk ran pretty quickly and, unsurprisingly, found and fixed a ton of errors. You can't crash and reboot so many times without leaving some ugly scars on your hard drive. Disk Defragmenter fired up and started to run around 11:00 at night, and I decided to babysit it - I didn't want to have something come up that would crash it without me knowing about it.

12:30 rolled around soon enough and the program was only about 25% done, but it seemed to be picking up speed. At 2:00 in the morning and 50% complete I decided to take a break and finish taking out the trash. By 3:30 it was approaching 75% done and I decided in for a penny, in for a pound. By 3:35 I was trying to sleep in the computer chair but couldn't because of the glare from the screen and the cold wind that was blowing through the open window. At 4:00 it crept up to 78% and was in the home stretch, working on the little blocks that belong at the end of the hard disk, and now I couldn't sleep because of the noise of the birds doing their pre-dawn singing. By 5:00 it was still at 78% and I said screw you guys, I'm going to bed. The sky was already brightening from the dawn - something I haven't seen in a long time.

Three and a half hours later I was back at the computer to shut it down after a successful defragmentation. I took another brief nap, and then restarted the computer to see if it worked better. It seems to be better, though Blogger is acting funny, so I'm writing this in Wordpad. (I haven't tried Word to see if it got fixed, but I have a feeling it didn't. Maybe the problem that's preventing me from installing anything has been fixed, though.)

So that's why I'm not writing my planned post. After a night like that, how could I possibly write something so involved?

4 comments:

Gort said...

You're right, I didn't think it was funny. It's a crime to fake your own death although this stunt doesn't rise to that level being that the WWE is a work of fiction. But in a time when American soldiers are being blown up by car bombs almost everyday this was tasteless to say the least.

D.B. Echo said...

I was pretty ashamed of myself after I read your post, but I decided to let the original post stand. That was my gut reaction to seeing the cover of The Citizens' Voice and then reading the page 4 story. I guess since I've never taken pro wrestling seriously and have always been pretty revolted by it, I didn't really have any sort of thought as to someone being misled or offended by this stunt.

My bigger concern about pro wrestling is kids imitating the moves and, more seriously, the attitudes and behaviors of the characters in this fiction. When I was a kid I would see other kids get into pro-wrestling style shouting matches in the playground, the I-can-scream-louder-in-your-face stuff that used to take place during the between-match interviews. And we've all seen where that has gotten us: Chris Matthews, John McLaughlin, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilley, the Sunday Squabble Shows, all that crap that passes for political dialogue.

But, yeah, I guess a make-believe car bomb in this day and age is in pretty bad taste. (Though the Irish Car Bombs at Molly Maguire's in Olyphant taste mighty fine!) But I totally understand your point.

Gort said...

Good point about the talking head screamer shows. We'll have to get together for some of those Irish liabations.

whimsical brainpan said...

I'm not at all surprised that it was fake.

I'm sorry your computer is still acting up.