Well, I'd have liked to update before now, but there has been a little problem. See, my web-master came over for a jolly good time this week. We were planning on LANing the night away, between Unreal Tournment and Diablo 2. Except we forgot one rule. That one seemingly tiny, insignificant, fine print, subatomic rule that one must follow when using a Microsoft operating system. Assume before you even turn on the computer that a freakishly random, totally unpredictable event will occur while you're trying to do something and completely wipe out your OS. You know, like sneezing, or trying to download a large file, or installing LAN drivers using an install program that only does LAN drivers.

So my dad says before we go to reinstall the drivers "I uninstalled the LAN," which I foolishly took to meant he uninstalled the drivers. So we go to install said drivers again, and the machine tells us that it's not OK to remove some device because it has ROM. A little disturbed by this news, as nothing bizarre like this happened the last time we installed the drivers, we frantically hit cancel as many times as we can before the mouse locks up. The keyboard still works, but of course, since the brilliant people at Microsoft decided to make their GUI embedded within the system, and let said GUI be killed by other programs, we had to hard reboot. No control+alt+F1 for us.

Cue classic windows error: "blah blah blah.vxd doesn't work. We're sorry we fucked it up, but it's still your fault since you triggered the program that just randomly killed your operating system. But hey, unless the drive was writing when the system crashed, there's still a ten percent chance that your hard drive wasn't accidentally formatted in the process! Please send all errors to kissmy@ss.microsoft.com and then upgrade your system for the palty price of 400$ oh, and press any key to continue." We press the anykey, and the computer shuts down.

Panic, reboot, repeat.

Five minutes later my dad pops his head in and says "Now don't go killing my computer." Of course it's too late now, as I proudly announce the sheer idiocy of Windows 98 to him. His face turns red, smoke billows from his ears, and asterisks, exclamation points, and ampersands emerge in 80 point font from his mouth. And his wrath is aimed at us. All slightly odious, 6 foot 3, 250 pounds of it. Since we should have followed that golden Microsoft rule; never expect something to work the way you want it to. At all. And we are the ones who initiated the sequence after all. And then he mentions that we had to enable the LAN in BIOS. All of our troubles would have been saved had he simply said specifically what he had done. But according to him, he did say he turned it off in the BIOS. The fact that I and my web-master both heard differently mattered not to his swelling head. He said what he said, and that was THAT. We must have both been lying to cover our tracks or something.

He muttered many expletives, shouted still more, gestured until the harsh, arctic June in Central New York wind whipped through the house and put out the electric lights, but the demons in the computer were not impressed. But suddenly, he had an epiphany. He decided that instead of reinstalling his operating system, he would ghost the drive. Ghost is a program that takes an image of one's hard drive and puts it back the exact way you left it, assuming the partition is the exact size of the original image and not a byte more. And of course my dad had since rearranged everything, so this process involved roughly a days worth of copying and reformating and partitioning.

So, he bitches and yaks on and on about how we messed the computer up, and all the trouble he has to go through to fix the computer, as the thing slowly, ever so slowly, does its job. *Time passes* He de-ghosts finally, and now windows XP (surprise surprise... Well, it was to him) doesn't register in the boot loader, so he has to reformat and repartition some more. I suggested that he just fix to boot loader, or call my web-master to help him do it, but my dad's head was too far up his ass at this point to understand what I was saying. What he did do though was say that my web-master was never to touch his machine ever again, and that I would be lucky if I did. So he spent all day today fucking around with the computer taking the hard road on purpose, despite the nude women, neon sign proclaiming "EASY WAY, STUPID!" and conveyor belt urging him to fix the damned boot loader. There's a reason hubris killed off the ancient Greeks.

So XP is installed, in all its EULA bastardization glory, reminding all who actually take the time to read it that you have to pester Microsoft for an activation code every time you change hardware. Because of course someone's going to try and pirate their shitty operating system with more security holes in it than airports. They won't want to upgrade their system or anything... Mind you, a full OS install takes roughly two hours.

Except now Fedora, our Linux distribution, won't work, so my dad reinstalls that, which takes another two hours. Bravo, I say. Man triumphs over machine. Perserverence conquers stupidity and lack of common sense. My dad spends two days trying to fix a problem an hour would have solved. And he's supposedly computer savvy!

It's always a sad day to learn that your parent(s) are completely retarded, but at least I am disillusioned now, so I can stop trying to follow in my dad's footsteps... Aww man, I can't even keep a straight face typing that. About the last thing in the entire world I wanted to do was follow in my dad's footsteps. He majored in Music and Journalism... Well, the last thing in the entire world I'd want to do is walk around on hot coals, naked, singing show tunes to an audience of the clinically obsese.

Anywho, tomorrow hopefully I'll get some writing done like I've been trying to do for four days...
posted by Slade at 10:42 PM