July '07 Pot Poury
It was a dark and stormy night in a strange world — all the more strange because it was daylight and it wasn't raining. It is my practice to check the local Doppler radar before I start out for my walk on the beach. I don't mind, in fact rather enjoy, walking in the wind and rain. Lightning not so much. So on the morning in question the radar screen contained a few minor red blobs moving toward the ocean but it looked like they were going to miss me. As I started my walk I could hear some minor thunder rumbles that seemed to be far enough away to not cause me immediate concern. Then one of the biggest, baddest lightning bolts I have ever witnessed — the kind where you hear the crack at the same time you see the flash struck way too close for comfort. Taking this as a friendly caution from Mother Nature, and after thorough consideration of all the relevant statistical permutations, which took approximately one-tenth of one percent of one nanosecond, I got the hell off the beach and headed for the safety of my car and home (a distance of less than ½ mile). Since most of my readers already have a sense of where this is going, I will just cut to the chase (a term the origin of which I haven't a clue). Ignoring all the more appropriate and deserving targets, the bolt had paid a brief visit to my apartment, which is in a pretty large building. Later, I learned that a number of people lost appliances and it fried the fire alarm system for the building, but that was just a coverup, that bolt was looking for ME.
Synopsis of Subsequent Events
[ Dear Reader: Tread not this tortuous trail, which I am including primarily for documentation purposes. Just skip down to what this means for my site.]
Notified insurer Balboa, excellent service, took computer to Circuit City for diagnostic, fried mother board and CPU, called Hewlett Packard to arrange overnight shipment of said mobo and cpu, HP would not sell me the parts because my 'puter was still under warranty, sent me an empty box in which I reluctantly shipped my unit back to the factory repair center, computer had two hard drives and years and years of files, HP returned it with just a bare bones version of Windows XP, and one blank replacement hard drive. Downloaded and/or reinstalled all my applications from discs, reinstalled all my files which I had carefully backed up on DVD's up until early this year, when I purchased a one year contract with Carbonite, an online backup service, which promised to back up "everything on your PC" for complete and easy restoration after computer catastrophes, stopped backing up my files on DVD's because the safety of my data was professionally backed up on a secure server, went online, reinstalled Carbonite., and followed instructions to restore "everything on my pc", in fairly short order, my desktop reappeared complete with all my favorite urls, hot damn!, I exclaimed just before the shit hit the fan. LIAR, LIAR, PANTS ON FIRE! This false advertising piece of rip off "treasure" of preserved data, contained, based on cursory inventory, my desktop and a few folders from the HP Administrator's files. Missing were all my Word Perfect documents (several hundred documents), the folder Utube, which contained all the videos I had uploaded to said tube plus a number of mini-clips which I had painstakingly created to insert in future uploads, and folders containing tons of pics, (yes including some of those) and graphic tidbits, all of my work projects in SiteSpinner, and in fact Carbonite had saved only the stuff I could duplicate, and none of the irreplaceable stuff I had done since April. (Internal anger volcano still building pressure).
What this Means for My Site My data base has always been an organizational cesspool. So what I have decided is that since I have to try and rebuild my whole goddamn computer kingdom, I will do so in the orderly, linear fashion I have always abhorred. This is going to take a lot of time and I am going to hate it. If I live through the ordeal I will return as soon as I get my act together.
Meanwhile, ponder this....
One more whine before I go. This is so fucking frustrating and discouraging [author spits on ground, wails plaintively, whimpers, desperately tries to awaken his resilience genes, and with resolve born of a lifetime of overcoming pain and suffering, reaches down once again to grasp his bootstraps. Oh shit. I am barefooted.]
Your homework, should you accept it, is to flesh out with your own reasoning my current skeletal apriorism. Subsequent to 9/11 our American psyche has developed a clinically significant form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Despite our proclaimed national bravado we experienced a sense of helplessness— our smug assumption that we were safe from the dangers intrinsic to other parts of the world was shattered by the reality that we could be hit at anytime, by anybody, and we were not prepared either to defend ourselves nor heal our wounds. This exacerbated our development of a dissociated state which left us no less or more vulnerable to our enemies, but rather allowed us to become victims of our own government and to the loss of freedoms that could not be taken, only surrendered. [And for the conspiracy clan: Are there people conspiring to take over the world? Of course. Have they done it, or could they ever do it? No of course not. In terms of our own government, the stopper is simply a lack of competence. In terms of the world, a function of chaos theory.]
Our democracy is being destroyed from within, and we can protest with barely a whimper. There is no growing discord, merely a growing dissociation from the true state of our nation to be replaced with a frenzied plethora of "reality shows". But look on the bright side, at least we have learned to play the fiddle.
Back soon as I can. Please get well.
It was a dark and stormy night in a strange world — all the more strange because it was daylight and it wasn't raining. It is my practice to check the local Doppler radar before I start out for my walk on the beach. I don't mind, in fact rather enjoy, walking in the wind and rain. Lightning not so much. So on the morning in question the radar screen contained a few minor red blobs moving toward the ocean but it looked like they were going to miss me. As I started my walk I could hear some minor thunder rumbles that seemed to be far enough away to not cause me immediate concern. Then one of the biggest, baddest lightning bolts I have ever witnessed — the kind where you hear the crack at the same time you see the flash struck way too close for comfort. Taking this as a friendly caution from Mother Nature, and after thorough consideration of all the relevant statistical permutations, which took approximately one-tenth of one percent of one nanosecond, I got the hell off the beach and headed for the safety of my car and home (a distance of less than ½ mile). Since most of my readers already have a sense of where this is going, I will just cut to the chase (a term the origin of which I haven't a clue). Ignoring all the more appropriate and deserving targets, the bolt had paid a brief visit to my apartment, which is in a pretty large building. Later, I learned that a number of people lost appliances and it fried the fire alarm system for the building, but that was just a coverup, that bolt was looking for ME.
Synopsis of Subsequent Events
[ Dear Reader: Tread not this tortuous trail, which I am including primarily for documentation purposes. Just skip down to what this means for my site.]
Notified insurer Balboa, excellent service, took computer to Circuit City for diagnostic, fried mother board and CPU, called Hewlett Packard to arrange overnight shipment of said mobo and cpu, HP would not sell me the parts because my 'puter was still under warranty, sent me an empty box in which I reluctantly shipped my unit back to the factory repair center, computer had two hard drives and years and years of files, HP returned it with just a bare bones version of Windows XP, and one blank replacement hard drive. Downloaded and/or reinstalled all my applications from discs, reinstalled all my files which I had carefully backed up on DVD's up until early this year, when I purchased a one year contract with Carbonite, an online backup service, which promised to back up "everything on your PC" for complete and easy restoration after computer catastrophes, stopped backing up my files on DVD's because the safety of my data was professionally backed up on a secure server, went online, reinstalled Carbonite., and followed instructions to restore "everything on my pc", in fairly short order, my desktop reappeared complete with all my favorite urls, hot damn!, I exclaimed just before the shit hit the fan. LIAR, LIAR, PANTS ON FIRE! This false advertising piece of rip off "treasure" of preserved data, contained, based on cursory inventory, my desktop and a few folders from the HP Administrator's files. Missing were all my Word Perfect documents (several hundred documents), the folder Utube, which contained all the videos I had uploaded to said tube plus a number of mini-clips which I had painstakingly created to insert in future uploads, and folders containing tons of pics, (yes including some of those) and graphic tidbits, all of my work projects in SiteSpinner, and in fact Carbonite had saved only the stuff I could duplicate, and none of the irreplaceable stuff I had done since April. (Internal anger volcano still building pressure).
What this Means for My Site My data base has always been an organizational cesspool. So what I have decided is that since I have to try and rebuild my whole goddamn computer kingdom, I will do so in the orderly, linear fashion I have always abhorred. This is going to take a lot of time and I am going to hate it. If I live through the ordeal I will return as soon as I get my act together.
Meanwhile, ponder this....
One more whine before I go. This is so fucking frustrating and discouraging [author spits on ground, wails plaintively, whimpers, desperately tries to awaken his resilience genes, and with resolve born of a lifetime of overcoming pain and suffering, reaches down once again to grasp his bootstraps. Oh shit. I am barefooted.]
Your homework, should you accept it, is to flesh out with your own reasoning my current skeletal apriorism. Subsequent to 9/11 our American psyche has developed a clinically significant form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Despite our proclaimed national bravado we experienced a sense of helplessness— our smug assumption that we were safe from the dangers intrinsic to other parts of the world was shattered by the reality that we could be hit at anytime, by anybody, and we were not prepared either to defend ourselves nor heal our wounds. This exacerbated our development of a dissociated state which left us no less or more vulnerable to our enemies, but rather allowed us to become victims of our own government and to the loss of freedoms that could not be taken, only surrendered. [And for the conspiracy clan: Are there people conspiring to take over the world? Of course. Have they done it, or could they ever do it? No of course not. In terms of our own government, the stopper is simply a lack of competence. In terms of the world, a function of chaos theory.]
Our democracy is being destroyed from within, and we can protest with barely a whimper. There is no growing discord, merely a growing dissociation from the true state of our nation to be replaced with a frenzied plethora of "reality shows". But look on the bright side, at least we have learned to play the fiddle.
Back soon as I can. Please get well.
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