The die is cast. After about 6 hours of cumulative talk-time with Dell tech support over the past two days, I had to clean install this morning. So now I guess my system is spring time fresh, and all that info is gone. If you’re a friend and reading this, I probably no longer have your email address. What has been most overwhelming here has been the loss and frustration I’ve felt. Disproportionate to the event I think. The actual documents and such I don’t miss so much. But while the machine was down, I could barely think about anything else. I was medicating myself by watching season one of Futurama with the commentary track on, which was both comforting and irritating, since it meant that I couldn’t hear the jokes on the show unless the volume was so high that the commentary was completely disruptive. I took a one hour break to watch the Joe Schmo Show, which is one of the only bearable reality shows. So what was I mourning in this whole process? the ability to go online easily? That’s a need I couldn’t have even articulated a few years ago. So perhaps the computer has become one of the battery of distractions I deploy about myself daily. Interesting after London where my media input was greatly reduced: no tv, a little news on the radio, occasional email checks from the gallery’s Imacs. At home I have a media regime and it’s interesting that I got home and almost immediately screwed it up. (I wish I could pretend that this whole foul up was something that happened to me but it didn’t. It was something that I did) One interesting side effect: computer crash stories play around the office like family illness stories.
Condolences on the data. I recenlty lost a work PC as a direct result of carelessness, and a years worth of collected AP images and art photos I’d been collecting. No “important” data, but I understand the loss.
I have promised myself I’ll get the Futurama DVD sets if I continue to shut the TV off right after Samuri Jack ends.
Where is the future that was promised us?
To paraphrase Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs, computers will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.
Am I the only one who finds it ironic that while your computer was broke you spent your time watching cartoons about a futuristic technologic dystopia?
Where’s my flying backpack? My personal replicator for my afternoon Earl Grey tea? My Orgasmatron? (And while we’re at it, world peace?) And I’m still waiting for George Jetson’s job (which, apparently, Homer Simpson seems to have got).
You’ve got to come over for a movie night of JUST IMAGINE, a science fiction MUSICAL made in 1930 about what life would be like in New York City fifty years later (1980), which you can bet Matt Groening and friends had in mind when creating Futurama. From the plot summary at IMDB: “New York, 1980: airplanes have replaced cars, numbers have replaced names, pills have replaced food. Scientists revive a man struck by lightning in 1930; he is chosen for a 4-month expedition to Mars, [which] is full of scantily clad women doing Busby Berkeley-style dance numbers and worshiping a fat middle-aged man.”
Yeah, I had to do a similar ‘clean install’ some months back. It does give one perspective to be computerless for a bit – it’s pathetic how much time I allow it to suck out of my days.