Journal of a Sabbatical

April 3, 2001

cursed and stupid too

Quote of the Day: "What do I win if I tell you that a BTU is a British Thermal Unit?" - me responding to the trivia question at Starbucks

An aside: they didn't ask me to define BTU, just to expand the acronym. However, it got me wondering how it is that the entire town is not winning free coffee today. Do people really not know what a BTU is? Do I only know because BiB and Thomas were both in the HVAC business?

Today's Reading: A Visit to India, China, and Japan in the Year 1853 by Bayard Taylor

Today's Starting Pitcher: actually I think they have today off so we don't get to see Tornado Boy's debut or Frank Castillo's debut or whoever is in the rotation after Pedro, Oh, and I hate this new monolithic MLB web presence. I liked the old redsox.com where I could get an inning by inning summary of the game in progress and listen to the radio broadcast on the web and for that matter access the site, which is now so heavily trafficked it's impossible.

Cursed. Cursed I tell you. And I don't mean the well-known sports magazine's willful cursing of Nomar Garciapara, although that would be a good subject for an entry. No, I am cursed beyond belief. My telephone is cursed. My computer is cursed. The dusty laptop is cursed. And besides all that, I seem to be experiencing sudden onset stupidity.

I set up Eudora with the user names and passwords and pop and smtp server names I was given and tried to get the dusty laptop to dial in and get its mail. The modem wouldn't work. After much wasted time I discovered that the phone was off the hook. I have this teeny tiny purple phone with a teeny tiny on/off button that I bought because it was less than $10 and I needed a phone in this room so I would stop running down the battery on the cordless one. So Wilbur had knocked down this teeny purple phone to someplace under the printer and it had landed on its teeny tiny on/off button. This only took 45 minutes to track down. So I could dial but then Eudora just kept asking me for the password over and over so I thought hmmm, why don't I try these names and passwords in hotmail from my own computer. Each of them came back with the message "invalid user name or password". OK, I give up. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong.

I installed one of those windoze uninstaller programs on the dusty laptop to see if I could fix a couple of startup glitches and free up some more disk space. This thing has a gigabyte hard disk but there's only about 200 MB free. Something is wrong. Well, I fixed the startup glitches (somebody had deleted some devices but not uninstalled them) but every time I tried to delete stuff the amount of free space got smaller. The uninstaller makes a backup of everything in case you change your mind. This might work if there were a lot of free space, in which case you could do your thing, decide you really want to uninstall stuff, and then delete the backups. Trouble is if you try to delete something really big, the disk fills up before anything actually goes away and Windoze freezes ... arrrgggh! I hate Windoze.

And that tiny little joystick-like thing on the dusty laptop is making my wrist hurt. Why no trackpad?

I thought I'd give myself a chance to succeed at something today, so I installed the SCSI card in the Hungarians' G4. That went OK except I couldn't' get it to recognize my scanner when I booted it up. SCSI Probe 3.5 tells me there's nothing on the SCSI bus. Grrr. About the most success I had on the G4 was installing the Flying Toasters. I love the Flying Toasters. They work fine. István did ask for a screen saver... Oh, and I managed to hook up the TriMedia Reader just fine too so the G4 can now read floppies. What is the deal with thinking nobody needs floppies anymore?

So I announced to my therapist this morning that I have 5 more days before I become unemployable in high-tech. My AARP membership card came yesterday. My stock dropped to a perilously low price. If I sell now I would be stupid. Better to be stupid than anxious? Can I get a job before I turn 50? Do high-tech companies have any idea what they miss out on by not hiring people over 50? over 40? over 30? over 18? Experience is a dear school but fools will learn in no other.