Who needs procrastination when you have computers?

I have four projects due all of which use the same program. So. You can imagine the utter joy I felt yesterday when one of the projects decided to freeze. When I tried to restart the program, it was corrupted. Curses.

And yet, no problem, because I have the disks so I just reinstalled it and voila! It was still corrupted. It was as if I had done nothing. Next, I searched the registry and cleaned out the remaining bits. Reinstall.

Corruption!

After arguing with it for awhile and getting exactly nowhere, I decided that, fine, I would just do a full system restore. I’d been meaning to do that anyway and this was as good a time as any. I backed up my documents. Uploaded my fiction, just in case, and did the restore. I love how zippy my computer is right after a system restore.

I was less excited this time about how my computer would no longer connect to wireless, but a mere two hours later, I’d managed to download all the MS patches that were required for it to function normally.

Another two hours went to restoring documents. Then came the program files. I was resolved to only install the things I actively use, which accounts for a surprising number of programs. Finally, only eight hours after I’d started, I had the system restored.

I opened the offending program. And it collapsed in exactly the same way as before. GAH! I had a clean install! Nothing would fix it, so I finally downloaded the newest version of the software. My bet is that some lovely little MS update patch conflicts now with my old version.

With that in mind, may I offer you a tragic news story, that Stephen Segal just shared.

A Canadian cruise ship struck submerged ice off Antarctica and began sinking, but all 154 passengers and crew, Americans and Britons among them, took to lifeboats and were plucked to safety by a passing cruise ship.

The stricken MS Explorer finally disappeared from view Friday evening, about 20 hours after the predawn accident near Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands, the Chilean navy said.

I wonder if they tried turning the boat off and back on again to see if restarting it helped.

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7 thoughts on “Who needs procrastination when you have computers?”

  1. On one of my many trips this year, the flight was delayed 45 minutes because they had to reboot the plane…no kidding.

    When the lights and air first came back on, I was all prepared to hear the Windows startup chimes coming from the cockpit. 🙂

  2. You didn’t say if the newest version of your software worked.
    I wonder if the passengers had reboarded would that have fixed it.

  3. Alethea: That would not, as a passenger, reassure me.

    Chang: Glad to provide a chuckle. Speaking of…

    Chris: Bwahahaha!

    -d-: The new software does work. Sorry I forgot to mention that bit.

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