Dontchahateitwhen

It makes me crazy when I'm reading along, once a day, every day, then suddenly my blogger STOPS. Without warning, the author will suddenly disappear for a week, sometimes two. What could be more important than blogging? Was s/he abducted to Mars? Is there crime afoot? Don't you love me anymore?

In my case, something far less (?) sinister was brewing. My beloved G4 Mac had a nervous breakdown. Something about all the Plant Tycoon I've been playing lately, no doubt. Fresh out of warranty, the logic board decides to go south. But then, if it's broken, perhaps it chose to go north. No, if it's logic-less it WOULD go south. Pardon. Aaaaaaaaaanyway, we picked up a new, warrantied G5. Whew. Blazin' fast. And even skinnier than the G4, larger screen, smaller (and quieter) keyboard, BOY do my Fabled Reptans look gorgeous on this thing!

I've been making do with hubby's PC laptop he brings home from work each day, but that thing is stupid. Everything takes forever, the commands are senseless, and the wording of things is SO 1990 (run? Run? There's a command called RUN? What IS this, DOS!??)

Back in the 80's I was a software techie type, teaching people how to work DOS and a buggy little program called NOMAD. But that was stone knives and bearskins. I used to look down my nose at people who had those new Macintosh things because everything was behind an icon curtain and they couldn't tell the computer what to do and get it done. Well, the shoe is on the other foot now. (The boot disk is in the other drive now? Hm. I need new lingo.) PCs are stupid, requiring far too much hands-on by the user. You want to open this program. Are you SURE? Okay, how do you want me to open it? Do you want me to keep it somewhere? Where? No, you can't put it there, try again. Nope, try again. Okay, there is okay, but...Please!! With the Mac, I drop a doc on my desktop and double click it. It opens. I drop an app in my hard drive and it files itself.

And the wireless capability of that notebook was a joke. For pity sake, I run a Wifi in my house, and the Wii 50 yards away has no trouble reading it. My little Nintendo DS Lite has no trouble 75 yards away in the back yard! But this PC, sitting less than a foot away from the router would drop its connection over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and, you get it.

So, I'm back. My frustration level is beginning to drop, I'm able to get to my online life again without threatening to toss a computer out the window, and life is good. (Eternal life is better.)

Tomorrow I'll write something about a health crisis in our extended family: E. coli.