I just love this technology, but it sure can bite you on the butt.
I have no numbers to back up my claim, but I'm certain that the more dependent you are on technology, the harder the bite. It's that same law that dictates that when you drop a slice of pizza, the chances of it landing with the messy side down are directly related to the cost of the carpet.
No two ways about it. Much of my life flows through the ether of the Internet, though a bunch of silicon chips, through a bunch of binary code.
A part of my own restless personality is my inability to leave things alone, and that's what happened with my computer. I was experimenting, fiddeled where I should have faddled, and crisped the system. What's worse was that this laptop runs on Windows XP, a decent system but one that doesn't lend itself to experimenting and is beyond my level of expertise to fix when I screw things up.
Still with me? Good. For a few days I was more or less indisposed. I was running the computer through a quick-and-dirty operating system running off a thumb drive.
As I write this, I am pulling the system back together. I nos have a Linux system installed on my hard drive, and can boot it up without a lot of real fancy gymnastics. I have most of my programs in place. About the only thing left is getting a news feed (RSS) reader running, and I'm testing that now. This is probably the most important tool I use, because I download many news feeds and read them offline, and the feed reader allows me to organize all the news I read. Through the RSS reader, I check more than 1,000 headlines from more than 100 news sources and blogs daily, and it's a huge part of my online research.
I still haven't figured how to share my RSS feeds between my laptop and desktop -- will probably need to get a router and network them, but that's another project for another day.
That's the Cliffs Notes version of my fixes. For more detail (especially if you're the ubergeek who can't leave stuff alone), I posted that in The Workbench, Reloaded.
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