PC or not PC

Hello World, Greetings again from the very tail-end of April, believe it or not, and just about ready to launch headlong into the merry, merry month of May already. Of course, this is a 3-sport time of year, when loyal fans can get hit with a lot of bad news from many different sides, and all at the same time, thanks not. In the hockey playoffs, the Rangers have had their hands full with the Flyers, as expected, but still not as bad as the vaunted Penguins with the scrappy Blue Jackets, which I'm sure nobody could have expected. And speaking of unexpected things ..... My plan to keep my ancient steam-powered computer running all the time so I wouldn't have trouble getting it started again, only worked up to a point, and that was Saturday when suddenly everything went completely ka-flooey (please excuse the technical jargon there) and nothing would work, not even shutting it down. I finally had to pull the plug, and my worst nightmares came to pass when, true to form, the whole thing seized up and wouldn't turn on again. There was much fruitless time wasted in wrestling with it, but no amount of threats, coaxing or logic achieved the desired effect. Big problem! Especially since I had a long laundry list of things I needed to use my computer for, and this really threw a monkey wrench into my plans - that is, if I was planning on laundering a monkey wrench in the first place. Naturally, Bill (who has the strength of 10 because his heart is pure) leapt to my rescue, and made heroic attempts to solve the problem, and you can believe me when I say that you know things are beyond saving when even our resident tech maven and his famously magic fingers are stymied in their efforts. Things seemed pretty bleak that first night, as the reality of the disaster sank in, and the loss of all my data weighed heavily on my mind. Especially since I had no one to blame but myself for the whole debacle, try as I might to pin it on some other nefarious evil doers, and I ought to know. At last a tiny light shone through the blackness, and I remembered that I still had a spare computer from work that I wasn't using, and it was not only running the same operating system as my dead computer, but already had some of the same programs loaded that I would need. I snatched it out of storage, plugged it in where the old one had been, turned it on, and - HOORAY! - Windows XP! I never thought I'd be so happy to see that splash screen ever again in my whole life! After that, I still had to tweak some things, and try to find if I had other versions of documents and files that I was missing, but it was still a lot better than having no working computer at all. Of course, re-installing software is always a hit-or-miss proposition, especially when it's 20-year-old ancient steam-powered programs that I use, like Lotus and WordPerfect, that started out in DOS, and just barely tolerated by Windows anymore. It always seems to be one step forward and two steps backwards in this sort of process, so that it either won't work when you install it, or if it does work, it makes something else stop working that had been working previously, thanks not. It's been a long-drawn-out undertaking and a nuisance ("Printer? I don't see any printers!") but at least it turns on and off when it's supposed to, so it's already an improvement over the old one right there. We're still hopeful that the data can be retrieved from the dead computer's hard drive, and we can put this whole sordid business behind us, and get things back on track like normal people, and not crazed zombies from the Computer Apocalypse. It's at times like this, you really appreciate how much it certainly helps to have a spare computer hanging around when you need one, by golly. So once again, I was able to join the rest of humanity online, and slog through the voluminous "mail" in my incoming, which is a job in itself. Now, a lot of it is not really mail, even though that's what the jolly AOL man calls it. (I'm really going to have a talk with him one of these days about what constitutes "mail.") All too much of it is really just notices from places like Sears, Amazon or Broderbund about new products or special discounts, or even worse spam for who knows what from who knows where. Anyway, sometimes when I sign on, I have so many messages that it takes forever to read through them, even if most of them are junk. Today I signed on and had practically no messages, and half of those were not real mail. I suppose that means that everyone is very busy with the upcoming holidays, like May Day and Cinco de Mayo. And a good thing, too. My other computer problem has nothing to do with technical aspects, it's where the computer is located. It's a wonder that I ever get anything accomplished when I'm in the living room, because her very own royal self, Princess Inky wants to be so much "help" (here I'm using that term in the most unhelpful sense of the word) that she makes it just about impossible to do any work. First she wants to sit right in front of the monitor so I can't see what I'm doing. When I try to move her, she walks on the keyboard. If I move her off to the side, she plays with the mouse. If I push her away from the mouse, she climbs behind the monitor and starts knocking things off the back of the cart, which pulls the cords out of the power strips and USB hubs. It seems like I spend all of my time jumping up and rescuing my peripherals from cat paws, and closing dialog warning boxes that Windows is tossing up on the screen to alert me of one calamity after another. By the time I get back to my seat, she has long since made her royal personage cozily at home on the chair cushion, and giving me one of those "don't tread on me" kind of glares that she has no intention of removing her majestic presence from the spot under any circumstances. I don't know about everyone else out there in the normal world, but it often makes me wonder if Bill Gates has these problems! Elle