Late Thursday Night/Friday Morning

"I know some things that you don’t
I’ve done things that you won’t
There’s nothing like a trail of blood
to find your way back home"
Life is Beautiful- SIXX:A.M.


Eighteen months ago I went to Circuit City and bought a new computer. It was an unusual purchase for me. Unusual because I purchased a floor model. I never buy floor models, at least not when it comes to electronics.

Floor models tend to be higher end items that are heavily discounted because as a floor model they have been used extensively. I tend to view floor models as being very similar to rental cars. People don't take good care of them. Since it is not theirs, they have a tendency to beat the crap out of them.

A good salesman convinced me that this model had been thoroughly checked out. He swore that it had been taken care of and that I was getting a good deal. He did a good job of convincing me and sealed the deal by providing a serious break on an extended warranty.

If you haven't figured it you, the new computer worked beautifully for a while and then began to give me all sorts of trouble. I ran the normal diagnostics, antivirus, spyware, defragged it and more. Never did find any nasty bugs hanging out there. Managed to get it running a bit faster, but not like it was.

Eventually I came to regret the purchase. At least once a month I seem to have some sort of issues with it. It might not actually be that frequent, but I have been soured upon it. Who knows, maybe it is aware that I dislike it and is acting out.

At the moment the freaking thing and I are engaged in war. Two weeks ago I purchased a new external hard drive from the nice folks at Seagate. It is supposed to be a plug-n-play model. It all worked fine for about a week and then I ran into some mysterious problem. The dread blue screen of death flashed and I spent hours fighting to get the damn thing working again.

I bought the external so that I could back up my important files. I didn't think that my "just-in-case" preventative measure was going to be a problem. But apparently I was wrong and I just might plug in the recovery discs and start over.

I have managed to move about 75% of my files over to the backup, but still have a big chunk to take care of. So I am begging, pleading, praying and alternately threatening that damn thing. Let me get my files off and I'll stop bugging you computer, really, this won't hurt a bit.

In the interim I am working off of my BlackBerry and an older computer that my kids use. So I am getting things done, but not nearly as quickly as I would like. Double arghhhhhhhhh!