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peaceful boredom of my afternoon
Tuesday, October 9 2001
I never take the time to savor the days when there aren't canker sores in my mouth. Similarly, I can only tell that things were running smoothly in my life on the occasions when I deal myself a setback. Today was such a day. Everything was going nicely this morning, so nicely in fact that I decided to start playing around with microwave TCP/IP networking (in the 2.4 GHz "experimental" band). Inspired by Nathan VanHooser's radio networking installations, I'd ordered a microwave networking card. It arrived today and I immediately installed it into my main Windows 2000 machine. That's when the peaceful boredom of my afternoon was destroyed. From then on, any time I went to do anything network-related, the computer froze solid, including the mouse-controlled cursor. I tried uninstalling all kinds of different software, but nothing could correct the problem. Now I had something of an emergency on my hands. Radical action had to be taken or my main computer would be useless. I decided to do what I'm sure any Microsoft-certified tech support guy would have suggested: reinstall the operating system.
Getting my machine restored to anything approaching what it had been, with all my important applications in the right places, took hours and hours of work. Meanwhile Gretchen was watching an inaccurate movie dramatization of Jane Eyre.
Then it turned out that the network-induced computer freezes were still happening. My problem was not one of software, but of hardware. The ethernet card had wriggled slightly out of its socket when I'd installed the microwave card.
Later on in the wee hours of the morning, my fresh new Windows 2000 installation was ruined by an improper installation of PCAnywhere. So it goes.
The only good news in all of this was that I thought for a few hours that I'd lost all of my Outlook email, but luckily I was able to restore it.
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