Disaster Week

Ive been away from the Blogosphere this week - what a hell week.

This is the week that everyone needs you, everyone wants you and everyone cannot do without you. Advertisers target you, bill collectors hound you, friends vanish off the face of the earth and youre left with a face full of egg. This time of year sux. Heres a couple of tragic tales at my expense, for your entertainment.

Microsoft coughed up a doozie for me this week - just to put the pepper on.
I reject XP, and stay with 2000. Is that so bad?
I have all the OS patches installed yet the bug infested software "corrupts my user file" See error #318011. This particular system fault cannot be repaired and forces you to do the unthinkable - which is - when you are in a state of "Im really pissed off" mixed with "why the fuck does this keep happening?" and "im so tired, but I have deadlines", I make the decision to reinstall every last program on my PC, coz guess what? ..none of them work. They did 5 minutes ago, but now they don't. Whats worse is that I've lost all of my settings, my registered programs and every single email since March (the last time this happened!!!!!). I could have punched holes in a brickwall, and all I would've seen is a smiling and winking Bill Gates holding a meat platter and tropical fruit to congratulate himself, but no. That was Tuesday night.

Its now Friday and everything is finally back as it was. All programs reinstalled and re-registered, keyboard shortcuts back in action (I forget how my life was without them), although Im yet to reinstall all the skins and extensions to my Mozilla software yet - Gmail Alert, Weather Column, Blog Shortcut, RSS/XML feeder - a thought just now - did I need all that? Answer: No, not really but it saved me a LOT of time logging into websites looking for updates. The web comes to me and thats what its all about these days.

Anyway, Im in a much happier space now, until I tuned into 88.1FM this morning and heard static. Arrrrrggh! We had gale force winds last night, and I had worried about the wind, but the aerial had been through worse (actually in its second day) so its surely going to survive this bit of wind. I was wrong. So I put on my trackpants and busker gears, and up I went with the box of bits (solder, screw sets etc) - discarding my day of paperwork I had planned - to the transmitter site. The gut wretching feeling of "oh no" hit me when I got close enough to see the aerial was not visible, where it should have been. When I got up there, one of the tripod legs had bent right over. The fallen aerial was suspended on one of its support ropes as if the finger of god had flicked the whole thing from underneath. It would've taken a gust of 120-135kph to knock this baby off its hilt, although the almighty wasnt far away as I had to keep climbing up and down to avoid the sudden bursts of rain and howling wind today. No fun (unless you work at BCL).

I might continue my week of tragic tales sometime, but not right now. I must sleep (-p