Saturday, August 25, 2012

A Depressing metaphor for my life

I over watered my primary plant and so water started overflowing the water catcher thing below it and raining out over my room.  This was a fairly minor problem, but a problem none the less.

I tried to solve this problem via tilting and forcing the water out the other side of the water catcher thing where I could actually direct it into the container I'd used to water the plant in the first place.  Thus removing and containing the excess water and making everything go well.

This seemed to work at first, until the water catcher thingy decided it had been screwed with enough and detached from the plant pot entirely.  Drenching me, my bed, and nearby portions of my room.  Doing more to hurt things than ignoring the problem ever could have.

I have reattached water catcher thing, I have toweled up what I could of the spill but there was enough water going in enough directions that it doubtless went in directions I could never hope to towel up.  The true scope of the damage I may not know for quite some time.

And that, it seems, is like my life.  There will be a problem, I'll try to solve it, things might seem to go well for a little while, but in the end things will end up worse than they were when I tried to solve the problem.  Repeat for a lifetime, and you've got my life story.

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In other news, initial diagnostics are done on my computer.  Looks like the DVD drive and the hard drive are both borked.  Probably a good thing I sent it out before the warranty expires in a few days.  If things go average speed, I should have it back in about two weeks.

2 comments:

  1. Another approach: you do the reasonable thing. Stuff that isn't your fault works against you.

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  2. If you can get access to a computer with a working CD/DVD-RW, there's a way to get around a dead hard drive. I realize you said you had a dead optical drive too, but in the off chance that you can locate an old drive lying around somewhere or cadge one from someone, you can use this. Also, optical disk drives tend to be cheaper than hard drives if you decided to buy one. So, with that in mind...

    1) Download a live CD. I recommend something like Linux Mint or Ubuntu, but there's a list you can do a google search for. Most of them are completely free.

    2) Burn the live CD disk image to an appropriately-sized blank disk with the image-burning software of your choice. I use BurnCDCC for this. Windows 7 also has built-in disk-image burning capabilities.

    3) Stick the disk you've burned in your computer's optical drive and power it up. Make sure you've went into the BIOS and made sure that it's set to allow it to boot from the optical drive. The live CD will load itself entirely in RAM, even if the HDD is completely dead or gone. You'll get a functional desktop completely with web browser and whatever software and tools are available on the disk, and you can get some storage space by sticking a USB flash drive in somewhere before it boots. At this point, your computer is essentially a bigger and better internet appliance, but it's better than nothing. Plus, you get a new operating system to fuck around with, and later, you can use it to clean your computer (after it's completely fixed) if it gets infected by a virus or something. Or you can use it to back your files up to a stick even if the HDD is so infected it won't even boot properly.

    It's not the best solution, but it might be able to serve as a stopgap until you can get your computer fully repaired or replaced. I've done it before. If money gets tighter and my current PC croaks out without me being able to fix it, I'll do it again.

    Take it for whatever you think it's worth.

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