Sometimes when I sit in front of a computer I fall into my own little world where time doesn’t work the same way that it usually does, and other people mostly don’t exist. The only people who do exist are those who can give quick, useful information and want little in return. This world is a dangerous place to be and it’s a world I’ve just been inhabiting for 7 hours straight.
Frell (one of my computers) suddenly point blank refused to boot Windows at a very bad time, just as I was starting to get down to my DT coursework which is getting more and more behind, I desperately need my computer to be running Windows to do my coursework. At one point I had both Windows and Linux working together, but Windows had mashed up my hard disk and messed up the partitions. It wasn’t quite right. At this point I believe lauperr said something along the lines of “ok, it works. now leave it and get on with some work.” I could be wrong about this as I wasn’t really listening, in fact I wasn’t really listening to anyone except a few people who were answering my questions about boot loaders, partitioning and things. Anyway, being the perfectionist that I am this wasn’t enough so I carried on hacking at it relentlessly.
So 7 hours since I started tapping away at those plastic keys, I’ve learnt a bit about operating systems but my PC still isn’t doing what I want it to do, lauperr went to bed bored of waiting for replies from me, I missed a phone call from ruthy, I’ve not done my maths homework, I’ve barely spoken to a member of my family since I’ve been home and I have a headache. But worse than that, I’ve managed to delete the pictures directory from my hard drive by accident. This might seem like a minor thing, but to me it’s not. Those pictures were memories of some of the best times of my life in digital form, and the vast majority of those pictures don’t exist anywhere else. I had a backup on another hard disk, but I (knowingly) overwrote that trying to get Windows to work.
This makes me very angry at myself, not because I didn’t have better backups, but because I put stupid things above my memories of the people I love, and managed to ignore a lot of them in the process. I’m sorry. Especially to lauperr and ruthy.
In #imen rc said to me “do you sometimes worry that you’re a little too obsessed with your computer?”. Well, yes. But I don’t think it’s just my computer, I think I have a generally obsessive nature, a characteristic that has both advantages and disadvantages.
Last Friday night went to Gemma’s 18th birthday party which to be honest with you I was expecting to be a bit boring. But it was actually probably the best party I’ve been to this year (except my own, of course!), lots of wonderful people there and I danced my feet sore and drank lots of free beer 🙂 djkoa and lauperr came back to mine in a taxi and we watched Sneakers and randomly ordered a pizza in the early hours of the morning. djkoa left at about 2:30am for home which I couldn’t decide was because he really did get a message from his parents telling him to come home because they had to go out early the following day, or because he didn’t like the idea of spending the night in the house with me and lauperr 😛
I’ve been working really hard the past few school days but I still don’t feel on top of things.
I woke up to the most beautiful display of natural beauty out of the window this morning, fields covered with snow. They closed school, but not until lunchtime which was utterly pointless, like a lot of the things school does.
Tomorrow is another day.