Cannot Deny Geekiness

So, despite being cool yesterday, in an almost fall-like manner, the sun was bright and beautiful. I know this because I saw it from my window.

Despite my gung-ho attitude to get out and enjoy Saturday, I was tired and bum-like and barely stirred before noon. And when I was finally up and moving, I came in and began spring cleaning on my 4 year old PC.

This is the geeky part. I actually feel bad that I’ve never done a clean install on it. In four years, I’ve just banged away on it. Installing new software, removing software, adding new peripherals, etc. And in the last year, I’ve beefed it up just enough to shove along a bit more before another purchase. And in all truthfulness since I’m not a big gamer, tis still working for me anyway. My only push on it is image editing and that I watch TV on it often while doing other stuff. Hence new memory and a video card in the past year. Plus a big hard drive.

Basically, I guess despite my making fun (all in good humor) of the programmer geeks at work. When it gets down to bits and bytes and knowing the hex value of a letter/number in ASCII and EBCDIC, I’m not your guy. Bores me to tears. Probably why I lasted only a year in that major in college.

But I still like my toys.

So, I spent a long day, with the sun bathing me through the window while I dismantled my machine… to a point.. only to discover that HP’s back-up partition is far from a good thing. See, HP doesn’t provide back-up disks or CD’s to install from. They have a “hidden” partition that houses everything you hypothetically need to either do a destructive or non-destructive fix. I wanted destructive, but something is wrong with the set-up. Don’t know if a bug got it or what, but I finally caved. I spent the night tearing out everything that had been installed since I got this PC until it was down to its roots. And now that it’s finally at ground level of what I want, I’m going to do a bootable CD or DVD so that I can restore what I have now should I need to.

This is with working nearly 7 hour today. One team-member was still there when I left. That was enough for a Sunday for me.

Now, a little more TLC and then I’m going to go look at some lap tops. I’ve thought on those lines a lot of times and always moved myself back to a desktop in the end. And I’m not ready for a new one of those just yet. This one has a lot of life left. But the portability looks better all the time.

So, there’s the geek life. A sunny day spent inside, a week-end with the PC case open (still is) and pondering spending OT pay on a new techno toy.