Double damn.  The Social Director of the Internecks has a tag she uses for this kind of stuff.  Fuckity fuck fuck fuck.  This story goes back a few weeks now, to the days I was trying to upgrade the grafx card on this aging P4 Dell Dimension.  Long story short, first I couldn’t run the app because the grafx card suckt.  Then I installed a new grafx card and the computer wouldn’t start.  Then I put the old one back and the computer still wouldn’t start.  Then I put a different new one in and the computer wouldn’t start.  Then I put the old one back in and this time the computer worked.

So I bought a grafx card for a different slot.  Since the computer was hosed and sucky whenever I touched the AGP slot, I thought, well you know, maybe a PCI grafx card would be cool and life would improve and by god things were cool and life did improve until the computer just up and crashed.  Fuckity fuck fuck fuck

Well, I swapped the old grafx card back in and took the new grafx card out and I got the damn thing running and life looked good and then it crashed again.  And I promised myself a really good back-up if I could get it running - which I did, and sure as god made alligators the son-of-a-bitch crashed again right in the middle of the back-up taht I had hoped would be really good but now was simply hosed and sucky.  Fuckity fuck fuck fuck

I was jotting down the diagnostic codes that appeared on the blue screen each time the unit crashed and I looked a couple of them up and I got the suspicion that I had a disk problem, and I was really sad that I had no back-up.  But I have two hard drives in the unit and I thought to myself, self - I thought, you really oughta check the ribbon connector before you go too far, and so I disconnected the connector that hooks up the hard drive to the other hard drive to the motherboard and I put in a good one that I had in a junk drawer, and I was lazy so I only hooked up the one hard drive and damned if that didn’t work.  Life was good.

And the computer did not crash.

So I took a good back up of that 30 GB drive and I thought to myself, self - I thought, now would be the time to hook up the second hard drive, the 160 MB one with all your pictures and web files and such on it.  So hook it up I did and the computer crashed.  Fuckity fuck fuck fuck

At least now I had a clue.  So, much doinking around later, I was spinning deeper and deeper into corrupt files that were not letting me boot up.  The computer had the upper hand and my oxygen was running out.  There’s something called the hal.dll

HAL stands for hardware abstraction layer, but if you’ve seen 2024, then you know that things were a lot worse than a few corrupted files.  The son-of-a-bitch was singing “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer doooo…” at a lower and lower frequency until finally it just died and I was glad.

I reloaded a fresh copy of XP.  This took me through the Microsoft software licensing police zone.  Safely through the zone, I ended up here in my office on a Saturday night with the bad hard drive in a baggy, the redundant grafx card in its packaging ready to be returned to Best Buy, a freshly installed and unpatched version of Windows XP SP1, and an order entered for a Dell XPS 400 system and a 19 inch digital flat panel monitor.  Some people might be wary about diving back into Dell, but there are four Dell PCs in this house of varying builds and vintages and they all work. 

In fact, Dell support called me when I started whining about this stuff, and they would have been happy to share my frustration.  I’ve been second guessing myself, because I’m more like a quasi informed end user than I am a geek.  Maybe if I’d been smart enough to “expand” the hal.dll that I “copied” into the system32 directory life would have been good.  But I think the short answer is, this unit is no longer stable and I need a stable platform. 

fuckity fuck fuck fuck  

Thinking about Tony Pierce and Elizabeth Spiers this morning. Tony’s job at Buzznet ended. Buzznet is one of those attention aggregation places I think. I met Tony and Mark in New York last fall, but never actually clicked through to Buzznet. I do click through to Busblog from time to time, to find out what hip and virile young men who blog are doing in the real world. But not Buzznet.

Gawker was another one of those spaces I didn’t find much time to visit, although I did click through a couple of times after meeting Elizabeth Sneers at BloggerCon. I fell in love with her of course, so naturally I checked out her blog, but really what mid-twenties people who can afford Manhattan do there is just heart-breaking so I haven’t done too much stalking on that front.

I visited the Internet Social Director’s blog this morning, and found out the news about Shakespierce there. Then I read Tony’s Busblog post and noticed that in his recap of the last year with Buzznet he left out meeting the old fat blogger from Wisconsin and his wife on the lower east side, but he did mention meeting Halley at SXSW and I resolved to go back on my diet and write better so I will be more memorable.
Tony and Elizabeth will continue to succeed hugely whatever direction they take media-wise. I on the other hand will have to be content slogging along, finding a measure of happiness on the journey, but never grabbing the golden rings of fame and wealth.

Why this makes me think of Jaron Lanier, I don’t know… maybe it’s about fame and money? I don’t know how he’s fixed, but I think he caught some money during the Web 1.0 bubble. I read somewhere he sold a company. Anyway, after his Edge essay I shared a few thoughts about why I think his characterization of the anonymous good works at the Wikipedia as Digital Maoism is so much happy horseshit, boring and stupid on the face of it. A friendly acquaintance wrote, “I think you’re illustrating his point perfectly, because you tend to want to be popular, at the expense of thinking for yourself.”

And this made me think of Elizabeth, whose salty snarkiness put her on top, and of Tony, who is feeling down right now for lack of a J.O.B., both of whom are enormously popular and both of whom work their tails off for love of the work. And I thought of all the compromises I’ve made to stay friendly with people rather than to demolish them and make them understand once and for all that they are truly no better than chimpanzee shit splashed on the walls of the primate exhibit at the Cincinatti zoo. And I thought of all those people who believe in a two party democracy to whom I pander, and all the people who believe in “god” whom I seldom if ever directly confront about the absurdity of their beliefs.  And the libertarians.  And the librarians fro that matter.  And I thought about how Swift and Defoe had it easy because nobody had written over the top satire before and besides it was easy getting by with a pseudonym if you also held an endowed chair or something.

And I thought about how Lanier has no degree but he’s been chief scientist on Tele-immersion, and the Internet 2 thing, a real 2.0 venture and not some smarmy invention of the marketeers, and I realized that dead sea scrolls aside, Jesus probably was pronging Mary Magdalene but that doesn’t make my lack of faith in his godhead any more or less profound… even though his mom was a virgin, I’m SURE.
And last night Beth really said it all when she observed that people talking about the Dan Brown Davinci thing movie always say that the book was great but the movie was not so much, and what does that tell us about the critical faculties of the 21st century American reader?

And the critic is not an inventor, not so much an author as a sounding board, so my friend’s observation is probably true… I hold back because I am looking for friends.  Or - and this is worse, much worse - I pick subject matter to lampoon and lambast in hopes of finding popularity among people whose lamentations harmonize with my own.  Not because I really give a shit.
lala