Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   very teenage rebellion
Wednesday, May 24 2006
Today I had my last Wednesday routine before flying out to Los Angeles to do that programming gig I mentioned the other day. In case you don't remember, on Wednesdays I drive to Woodstock, have a one or two hour meeting with the "tech group" at the Hudson Valley's most famous independent rock and roll radio station. Then I take some firewood from where it accumulates beside a nearby dumpster (today there were also usable scraps of "one by" shelving lumber). Then, if I have any scheduled for the day, I make a housecall to conventional Woodstock "computer repair" clients. Today I had one such client, C, a British journalist who does a mix of freelance and beat reporting, mostly for British newspapers and (now) websites. A lot had happened since the last time I'd seen C. He'd married his girlfriend and he'd been temporarily crippled by an unconventional motorcycle accident. According to C, he'd slowed down to make a turn onto Glasgo Turnpike from 212, and as he'd done so some old lady had slammed into him from behind. "There were no skid marks on the pavement," he added. The offending car by itself hadn't done the injury, C's bike had, falling over upon and crushing his ankle. Now he hobbles around in his house on crutches, several screws keeping important chips of bone in place.
The one other notable thing that had transpired in the few months since I'd last seen C was that his nerdy son L had entered the golden age of his teenage years, forming a punk rock band with some friends called the Defenestr@tors. They've already played at CBGBs and had coverage in the local newspapers. I went downstairs at one point to check on L's aging desktop computer and shouted up to C, "It's very teenage rebellion down here." There was a huge Ramones poster on the wall, drum kits, spray paint stencils, guitars, holes punched through the drywall, and then (as always with kids at this transitional age) a collection of tiny Viking figurines, the most salvageable artifacts of the pre-rebellion.

This evening, after doing some last-minute web development for a client whose needs I will soon be neglecting (in this case, I made an ad rotator), I made the mistake of trying to put the original 40 gig hard drive into the TiVo. The reason I wanted to do this was because it's been freezing up a lot lately and it seemed likely it would be have to be replaced sometime during my three week absence, an d I didn't want to lose the 120 gig drive I'd put in it. But it turned out that I didn't have a restorable backup of the original drive; all I had were 120 gig images. So I ended up putting a brand new 120 gig drive in the Tivo with a freshly-restored 120 gig image. Hopefully that will last three weeks until I get back. These aren't the sorts of things you want to find yourself doing the night before departing for a three week absence. But the TiVo is as essential as electricity in our house (especially in women's basketball season, which just began).


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?060524

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