Saturday morning. I feel a lot better. My mood had changed significantly yesterday when I started having computer problems, about 08:00. It all started off with a registry error, and went to hell from there.
Karen asked me last night if I had started drinking again. (I haven't of course, but this is indicative of the change of character that overtakes my when I'm faced with overwhelming dispair.) I was that bad. Anyway, I finally got it going again after we had gone out shopping and I had a chance to disconnect from the problem for a while. I disconnected the second hard drive that I had installed and suddenly the Compaq
I had made backup files to my "E" drive, and mostly they worked. However, the one with my email addresses and messages didn't. Neither did my "Favorites" file. I'm not sure how a DOS file transfer manages not to work, but the directory wound up being empty after all was said and done.
Anyway, I need to get a tape drive, or something. I think that a ZIP drive is overkill, and I've heard bad things about them, too, about service. A lot of bad things. Too many people get exposed to their supposedly shitty service department. There has to be a reason for that beyond service, the quality of the product must be... variable...
Anyway, tape drives have been around for a long time and have proven themselves.
I'm beginning to think that I won't re-do my notification list. After all, I do write every day, and it was just mostly an ego-booster (HA!) and most of the people on it probably just didn't want to make me feel bad by un-subscribing. And I never said anything in the message that I wouldn't have said anyway... if it was different, it was just an afterthought.
I'm just helping to minimize the bandwidth problem (HA! again!).
So, if you were on my mailing list... I'm sorry. I no longer offer that service. I hope that your disappointment will be lessened by knowing that there are thousands suffering with you.(HA! again. This is getting boring, I'm going to stop with the HA!s.)
The down side is that... I'm going to have to take myself off of the "Tell Me, Dammit!" list.
I'm kinda planning on doing some major re-arranging in the computer room... well, more like major cleaning. Although she's not entirely to blame, Karen has the habit of putting stuff in here when she doesn't know where else to put it or if she doesn't have time to really put the object up. So I'm going to be making many trips to the basement, I'm afraid. I am just as guilty, if not more so, than Karen.
Speaking of Karen, she's leaving now to take Steve to Med-assist. He has been feeling bad (sore throat) for the last several days, so, on Saturday morning, he finally feels bad enough to do something about it. Kim and Matt and a few other people have left for Worlds of Fun, so Karen will be bringing Packy and Lacee over. Packy is going to be mightily disappointed, but I'm not putting Doom back on this machine. He'll just have to live without it. It really messed up all of my windows settings, anyway.
Most of my time last night was spent downloading and re-installing stuff. I have trimmed up my hard disks a lot; nothing like a good crash! Compaq has a really funny (not funny ha-ha) way of dealing with things. Their aforementioned "Quick Restore" formats the hard drive before it even tries to do anything else; kinda majorly pisses me off. The main problem was that I couldn't get it to give me access to the CD-ROM in DOS. Every Trick in the Fucking Book™ was tried; Every Trick in the Fucking Book™ failed. Thinking back on it, I should've just installed DOS 6.2 instead of 7.0 or whatever it is that comes with WIN95. Sure, now's a great time to think of that!
I'm also going to maintain a registry backup on both my "E" drive and on floppy. Maybe I can learn from this... I ran across a program to do this last night, but I forgot where the damned thing was. I'll have to do some more looking around, I guess.
More later... or maybe tomorrow.
OK, Gus forced me to write some more. He describes the Web Ring stats as indicative of "Journal Popularity" and, since they show Nilknarf in a Very Bad Light, I thought that I'd defend myself (and the ones who are lower on the list than me, even.)
I very, very seldom use the actual web ring. I mostly use the backup list and stats from Often, and the backup list from Open Pages. So I contribute practically nothing to the webring stats, although I visit a lot of sites. I dare say that if I used the webring to visit Gus' site every time I go there, he would certainly be number one.
Most people, when they find a site that they like, simply bookmark it. Or join the mailing list for updates. Or use one of the site update reminder services. There are two really good reasons to do this...
Onother kicker in the scheme is that there are web-savvy people that never hit the front page of many sites. If they are on a mail list, the direct URL is frequently included; therefore, they don't click the counter on the sites' main page. If they aren't on the mail list, they can use the auto-complete feature that comes with the latest/greatest browsers to get to the pertinent page; peoples' file-naming schemes are pretty easy to figger out, once you've been there a few times.
So... the only way to ascertain popularity... is... to look at everyones' log files. Well, you can't do that. Hmmm... maybe you can count the times that they're mentioned in other peoples' journals... that seems hardly fair, though. There are some people who never mention other journals in their own journal. Most of these people are my biggest fans! So, obviously, that won't work either.
Ehhhhh.... fuck it all. Read my old essay on Popularity. It still pretty well describes how I feel about it.
Again... more later, or tomorrow...
"Quick Restore" decided that it could work. Quick-restore my ass. Two hours, most of it putting on junk that I removed immmediately as soon as I could: AOL files and GNN and Compuserve.
"Quick Restore" my ASS!