Misadventures in Computing

…or why I vanished for like two weeks.

 

First of all, let it be said: I am a horrible blogger. I do have plans to remedy that but I gave up making promises long ago because no sooner do I make one than I break it. So, no promises but a solid hope that I’m going to get better about keeping this place updated. That said, here’s why I completely vanished from the Intarwebz for a while.

 

1) Moving is hard, yo — A while back, I pretty much decided it was time to move back to Mississippi. There were various reasons for this but the main one had to do with wanting to see my family and spend time with them more than once a year (if I was lucky). So, since around the beginning of May, I’ve been making plans to move. This took up an extraordinary amount of my time and energy. So, the little time and energy I had left over went into my writing instead of my hanging out on Twitter or blogging. Then, near the middle of June, the actual move itself took up all of my time and energy (and money). Now that I’m settled in, though, things should be smoother from here on out.

 

2) Writing is energy and time consuming — I have discovered that I can either write, watch TV, play games, or hang out on the Intarwebz but not all of them. So, I no longer play games outside of some strictly controlled scheduled game time. I do watch TV but only after I’ve hit a certain writing goal for the day. I don’t hang out on the Intarwebz as much because I spend most of my non-writing time working on the Internet and because the Internet is like one big field full of distractions for me. I can go and intend to hang out on Twitter for an hour and then find myself digging through various arcana on Wikipedia six hours later.

 

3) Sometimes, I think my computer wants to kill me — This is the main reason I vanished recently. Now, I’m the kind of person who generally knows how to avoid getting viruses and whatnot on my computer. I have up-to-date virus scanners and spyware searchers continually on the lookout for things that I don’t want on my computer. I have set up my cookie folders so that it’s hard for me to be tracked by websites who don’t explicitly ask my permission or who I don’t want tracking me. GeoIP places hate my guts because I do randomly send them information that screws up their carefully gathered intel on me.

 

However, like every person on this Earth, I have fits of weakness where I’m so certain I know what I’m doing that I do something incredibly stupid. Such as disable my anti-virus because it keeps bugging me whenever my Curse client updates itself and then proceed to hit a Trojan-laden email from a USPS-cloned phishing site that installs a rootkit and a virus to my Master Boot Record. I nuke and rewrite the MBR thinking that would solve the problem but instead got a computer that blue-screened on Winload. So, I did what anyone would do. Bought a recovery image, tossed it on a USB drive (that subsequently died), and tried to recover without a reinstall. Two days with about three hours’ sleep into that, I got a recovery tool that would let me do a full disc back-up, copied everything I could to a 1 TB external drive, nuked my hard drives, struggled over which to load the new OS on (one had over 10k bad journaling warnings which means it’s dead, Jim), found a site that would let me get a digital download purchase for Win7 (because my eyes bleed at the thought of Win 8 on a desktop), reinstalled the OS, redownloaded and reinstalled every application I could, rebuilt my iTunes library, redownloaded all my games, updated all of my major applications, and then nuked my external hard drive and did a full image back-up with files of my new computer so that once I install my brand new hard drive, I can copy everything onto it, nuke the Windows on my old (but still working) hard drive, and install ubuntu for dual-booting to see if a switch to Linux is in the cards.

 

On top of that (as if having to buy a new USB thumb drive and a new USB 1 TB external drive to replace the ones that are bricked, plus a new copy of Win7 and the recovery software + the paid upgrades to Photoshop Elements), my Lifeproof case proved to no longer be waterproof (this after I tested it thoroughly in my sink) and my new iPhone 5s I purchased in November is now a very expensive piece of garbage. Apple decided that AppleCare didn’t cover it since the water damage wasn’t “accidental” and Lifeproof told me that it must have been user error and that the extra warranty I’d gotten only covered the case, not the phone. So, I had to get a new iPhone 5s at midnight which meant shelling out more money and getting saddled with a two-year contract. However, I grilled the people at AT&T, recorded them, and had it written (I almost demanded it be written in blood but then I decided to be reasonable) down that they would replace the phone immediately for free if ANYTHING happened to it that wasn’t a deliberate attempt on my part to destroy the phone. So, score one for AT&T and nil for Apple and Lifeproof when it comes to honoring their warranties, I suppose.

 

I managed to get my computer back up and running on July 4th, declaring my independence from sitting here nursing the thing back to health. Of course, that meant I spent most of July 4th going around and resetting my passwords EVERYWHERE but, hey. Them’s the breaks. It also meant that I didn’t get much writing done last week and I’m now playing catch-up there and on a couple of other things. But, at least the worst of it is behind me (knock on wood) and I made valuable friends at the local liquor store since the guys there totally understood what I was talking about when I launched into a spiel about my computer. They even recommended some cocktails that were strong (but not too strong) so I could unwind a bit while not getting so smashed I couldn’t operate the computer.

 

Now I just pray to the Lords of the Bytes that I suffer no more BSoDs and that I be delivered from Trojans and led not into rootkits for like…forever. Or at least a couple of years. I’m not as young as I used to be and pulling multiple all-nighters takes much longer to recover from than it did when I was in college.

 

So, there you have it. My explanation for my vanishing. Here’s to hoping that it all works out in the future and that I’m not as absent from the Intarwebz as I have been.

 

— G.K.