Geek Habitat

January 4th, already. I see 2005 is following the standard set by 2004. I’m already four days behind, and the year’s just begun!

I rang in the New Year with my parents and brother, watching many delightful episodes of “Northern Exposure” before our champagne toast at midnight. Unfortunately, I awoke New Year’s Day to a 36-hour cluster headache that laid me out flat. Imagine a one foot long metal spike, one end impaled in your left eye and the other protruding from the left side of your neck — that was the pain I felt until early January 2. I get these periodically nowadays, fairly predictably coinciding with changes in my hormone levels. Lovely.

Yesterday was my first pain-free day. Since I’m still in the middle of my Windows XP restage, I spent most of the day feeding my computer CDs and re-entering serial numbers and keys to restore critical applications: Adobe Photoshop CS, Beyond Compare, Handy Backup, iTunes…
This time, I didn’t have to call Microsoft to re-authorize Office 2003; I did have to call Adobe to authenticate Photoshop CS. Unlike Microsoft, Adobe doesn’t outsource it’s customer service to India, so I had a short but pleasant exchange with a young man at Adobe. It’s getting so difficult to find actual Americans providing customer support to Americans that the exceptions are memorable and, well, enjoyable.

After doing all of my holiday shopping online, I don’t know why I had to break that perfect streak yesterday. I had such a terrible experience shopping at Target yesterday that I am going to stage a totally ineffectual but personally gratifying boycott of the place until they get their act together. What sucks is, due precisely to their screw-ups, I now have a $30 Target gift card… Moral outrage, meet financial conundrum!

When my Geek Quotient (GQ) is back to healthy levels, I’ll share the adventure that was my Windows XP restage. It’s geeky, it has tension and intrigue, and (so far) a happy ending. It’d be rated R in theatres due to “Excessive adult language and simulated acts of violence”. I have a sailor’s mouth and brawler’s demeanor when it comes to handling serious computer problems. I figure if they can’t take it, they shouldn’t dish it out in the first place, right?

Life is good, even though recent events have justifiably made me feel much smaller in it. I still have Christmas decorations and lights everywhere, but the weather’s been downright tropical (warm, humid and rainy). Somehow, we skipped right on past winter and into late spring! Business is good, even as I remind myself there is still a whole ‘nother website I’ve got to get online.