The Woodlands Biotch

bf has been fixing other people’s pc problems and installing networks and telephone systems for 15 years. in the time that i have known him, i have learned that anything computer related falls into one of three types of repair categories:

“this’ll only take a few minutes” – translates roughly to “this is totally easy, based on either a id-10t error or a loose nut between the keyboard and the chair”

“the best choice is to rebuild it/start over” – translates to “i’ll take it back to the office if you want, but basically, you’re f$#ked, and i hope you backed your $hit up sometime in the past decade” and

“this’ll take 15 minutes, tops.” – which translates to “this is actually going to take all night, and possibly half of tomorrow, because no matter how close i get to fixing it, there will be one last corrupted file and/or one last missing driver and/or one final fatal error that will keep you from your lunch/dinner/bedtime.

to which i’ve told him that the best way to keep jobs in the first or second catagory is to avoid claiming they fit in the third under any and all circumstances.

a funny thing happened yesterday, though. he didn’t curse a thing. in fact, he didn’t even make any claim as to how long it was going to take to do anything. wordpress, though, did me in. wordpress told me that upgrading the software on my blog would “famously take five minutes.” yeah, well… no. not really.

oh, *downloading* the upgrade took way less than five minutes. heck, even installing it still had me way under. it was the actual act of upgrading that got screwed. that, it turns out, had the infamous 15-minute curse written all over it. i should have known.

so here i am, finally, almost 24 hours later, almost completely back to normal. and in fact, in many ways, a better than normal. because now that the stupid upgrade seems to be working, i got to make a few cool changes. like adding some new *clickables* over yonder <— (howdy, doubleclicktech and bake@350!! ) and i was finally able to turn commenting back on, because i was finally able to include an actual, workable spam filter. so!

so thanks for enduring the black out. i’ll try not to have another for another couple of years. or so. ;op