The Crash -- and Other Happenings

Just found this post (October 16) was still in unpublished draft form... publishing now, and updating (again) in the next post.

I thought I'd take a few minutes and catch up for the month. First of all, I've been assisting with a martial arts class once a week (Tuesday nights from 6.30-8.00pm EST). If I were young, dumb, and single (no offense intended if you fit into any of those categories) I'd prefer to go 3 to 5 times a week, but I do have a wife, children, a life, and an aging body that doesn't recover in 12 hours anymore... so... once a week is "enough."

On the last Tuesday of August, while I was teaching our self defense class (around 7pm), my parents were told of a live webcast. (I'd known of it, but after looking at the ominous clouds in the sky and watching lightning strike nearby several times, I'd forgone telling anyone else in the house about the webcast.) Unbeknownst to me, my neighbor (helpful soul that he is) came over and spread the word (just after I'd left).

We lost our power several times in a row that night; only for a few minutes each time, but the last was a brown-out -- which "affected my computer negatively" -- it fried an important chip ("southbridge") on the motherboard. On my system, the southbridge runs all of the things that plug into the computer -- which means, everything I plugged in did not work properly (the monitor and floppy disk drive), or did not work at all (everything else). Found it rather difficult to use a system that didn't work properly, and that couldn't have information added to it except in 1.4M pieces.

The computer was built around 2001, so the motherboard is old, but it's been upgraded pretty-well and is sufficient for my needs. I tried, but couldn't replace the motherboard with a new one (my wife wanted to buy a whole new system, until I explained we'd have to repurchase several thousand dollars worth of software to make "new computer" = "old computer").

I was able to locate some used motherboards in a Canadian computer shop and purchased two of them via eBay (1 for backup). That was wonderful, but I didn't have them yet. On a side note: I despise Canadian shipping; it is unimaginably slow (if I ever produce an illustrated Canadian/USA dictionary, the Canada Post logo will be the only thing listed under the word "slow").

After 15 days, I finally got my new motherboards and installed one. No problems with the motherboard, however, when I updated the operating system, the system glitched (of course). Something with Windows XP service pack 2 doesn't like my system -- so now I'm slowly working thru the re-update problems. Hopefully this won't take long...