Isn’t this fun. My computer doesn’t work!
As I recently blogged, this computer of mine, the one I do everything on, is having issues. It just refuses to execute anything. “Run” is no longer an option when you right-click an icon. And using the command prompt is not an option, nor is the “Run” command line from the Start menu. This is now a computer that does everything but run programs.
You know, just that little thing.
Luckily, my web browser, Firefox, somehow miraculously continues to work, so I am not entirely cut off. But I can’t run my email program (Thunderbird) or my chat client (MUCKClient), or any other program, and so I feel cut off at the knees, or worse, the brain.
(If you had to do without one of them….. )
The email, luckily again, I can get through the web. I just have the Gmail account now, and really I only use an email client like Thunderbird because I am an old stick-in-the-MUD Internet dinosaur who doesn’t like using webmail because he’s used to the speed of having your emails downloaded to your computer all at once and then browsing them at your leisure, instead of webmail’s having to reload the web page every time you delete a message or anything else.
This difference is probably minimal these days, especially with the bit pushing power like Google has behind Gmail, but what the heck, I’m an old-fashioned Internet grump who remembers when this was all farms and grass and USENET and we downloaded gigabytes of data at 300 baud, both ways, and we LIKED it!
Actually, no, it sucked, and we complained constantly. Then changed it. That’s how this shit works.
And hey…. you’re welcome.
But I still can’t find a decent web-based telnet client or (better) chat client, and so I cannot hang out with my online friends and do the virtual socializing that plays such a vital role in my emotional stability, and that, coupled with the almost worse fact of not being able to run Winamp and hence not having access to the music that helps KEEP ME FROM RIPPING PIECES OFF PASSERSBY AND CHEWING ON THEM has left my emotional equilibrium more than a tad perturbed.
It seems silly, from a certain lofty point of view, that something as simple as this can throw me off so badly. I mean, it’s just computer stuff. Big deal, right?
But that’s just the smug intellect and its delusion of self-sufficiency speaking. It’s easy for the selfish and self-centred mind to imagine that it is whole, complete unto itself, and therefore does not need anything to be happy. It just chooses to do things for its own entertainment. Right?
Wrong. Your brain needs things just like your body does, and I am not just talking carbs and oxygen. And this likely goes quintuple for us smarty pants intellectual types. I don’t know about the rest of you nerds, but this nerd is used to a very high level of very dense and rich mental stimulation, and having half or more of that cut off by a computer error, let alone a completely mysterious one like this one,
Woops! Update time. Managed to get chat client working via command prompt, hung around and whined for long enough to cause some nice person to tell me where to get the REG file to fix it, and luckily Internet Explorer works (I thought it wasn’t working, but I had forgotten how integreted it is with Windows Explorer now) and downloaded the new Firefox and now everything is back to normal, knock on wood.
It was interesting being back in the land of the command line interface again. It’s not the sort of thing one forgets when one spent so much time there in the 80’s and 90’s. So I didn’t have any huge problems once I managed to remember how to change into directories that have 8.3 filename incompatible names.
But still, it felt weird to be typing everything again. It’s been a long long time since I was a grumpy GUI resistor, clinging to DOS because I didn’t like having to switch between keyboard and mouse all the time.
And I still don’t. I still do a lot of my Windows stuff via the keyboard. It’s faster and simpler and more efficient. If they ever got rid of ALT-TAB, I would just have to shoot somebody.
So, crisis over. Thanks for being here with me, gentle readers. TTFN, Too Tight for Nookie!