Living In Computer Hell

Where's My Really Big Hammer?


Have I mentioned that I live in a household with two adult humans, one tiny little long haired miniature Dachshund going by the alias of "Missy...the Turbo Pup", and...

FOUR COMPUTERS?

ok...six computers if you count the back up scraps laying around in various stages of construction, and EIGHT computers if you count the two PLC's (Programmable Logic Controllers) sitting in my shop right now.

Any way...

Only one of the machines is acting completely sane right now--Pat's corporate machine--on which I only handle the Internet and networking operations there of because her company does the security and VPN work remotely.

Then there is my old HP 17" laptop which has been relegated to the workshop and that's served me well over the past four or five years before I bought the "server PC" which currently occupies space in my office upstairs.

Since the "Server PC" has lost it's mind over the past couple of days and I've been wrestling with getting it converted backwards from Windows Vista to Windows XP Professional, a little Dell laptop that I rebuilt has served my needs in working a few feet from the sofa and my bedroom when I'm too lazy to walk down stairs to the shop.

So any way...with my menagerie of machines sitting around here I have more problems with computers farting and belching and barfing right now than any single human should have to put up with, and in my old age and chronological incompetence having lost the urge to stay on top of every single detail and development in the computer business (I let my subscriptions to Byte Magazine and PC World expire long ago) I'm not sure if I can weather the storm before me.

Right now I'm about ready to gather everything up, put it in a pile in my wheelbarrow, and haul it all outside to the compost heap.

I guess if it was easy everyone would be doing it, but managing a real network of computers designed to do something besides blog and goof around on Facebook and Twitter is a damn hard proposition from my perspective.