Saturday, March 25, 2006

We have become far too dependent on technology these days, which seriously underscores how far up shit-creek we will become in the event of a total collapse of social infrastructure.

Case in point: over the past five days, I have had two pieces of technology spontaneously go kaput on me. First, my iPod goes down. No major loss, as I can't exactly use it to do my homework. Mind you, my workouts at the gym have been subjected to listening to a bunch of crap music piped through the gym speakers, but considering the added time and expense (thankfully covered by Apple and Hewlett-Packard), it's something I'd rather do without.

And then my computer spontaneously goes piff. While plugging in my USB flash drive in an attempt to get some work done, the computer just freezes all of a sudden. No longer responding to keystrokes, I reset it. Assuming that the hard drive has overheated, I turn it off and leave it to sit overnight, then try again. Still nothing.

This is somewhat remeniscent of my last computer, which had a hard drive failure that occured slowly over the course of several months, giving me plenty of warning time. Today, after sending it to the shop, a quick diagnosis reveals that either the motherboard or the CPU has spontaneously bitten the dust. This is somewhat good news, as this means that I don't have to go back and reinstall of those programs while kicking myself for not backing up my programs and documents. But either way, I'm out a couple hundred bucks for replacing either the CPU or the motherboard. Dammit.

The problem with a lot of technology is that impending failure is not indicated with compromised performance or whatever (eg: stuff takes longer to load, tends to overheat, etc.). Instead, it'll just spontaneously go under, just like that.

As a result, I am now typing this on my mom's computer and I'm in the process of hooking up my hard drive, but but probably shouldn't boot up from it, given the completely different computer configuration (much slower CPU and graphics card, to name two).

Which means, technically, I don't have an excuse for missing deadline. Double dammit. But at least I got an extention. But I'm still gonna have to do all this crap at school.

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