Computers and my bookout

My comp really screwed my life over this bookout. First on Friday night it came on with the words DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER. So my hard disk was failing. Is failing. Some frantic minutes rebooting and digging out the Windows XP disk and the spare hard drive. Then after a couple of reboots and swapping the wires about it started working again. Geez.

Then on Saturday morning the internet died. No real panic, it's not quite as devastating compared with a hard drive failure. I composed and played Civ 4 for the morning then went out, thought it'd be fine when I got back from dinner with friends.

It wasn't. Neither was it on Sunday (today). Now can you imagine living a bookout without even checking your mail? I only managed to squeeze in a blog entry on Friday for crying out loud. And my connection was already cranky then; I couldn't even finish my email. I burnt my whole morning and half of the afternoon desperately changing the phone wires, checking the connections, trying to dig out the old modem (successfully) and the driver (unsuccessfully). All that for nothing.

I have no internet connection now. When this post goes online it'll probably be in a couple of weeks. I feel thoroughly emasculated.

And this really drove home how dependent I was on my dad to fix the comps. Papa, he'd know what to do. There was never a 70-year-old quite as comfortable with computers as he was, probably never will be (till Steve Jobs turns 70, possibly). I realised that when I was at Sim Lim Square with my brother Adrian shopping around for a new hard drive - I'd forgotten to check if my comp used IDE or SATA drives (they use different connectors; if you have a SATA drive and IDE cables or vice versa, you're fucked). Dumbass me. I got a 320 GB IDE drive in the end, thanks to Adrian's advice. (phew it works - yeah he's even more a comp geek than me).

Yup and on Sunday morning when I screwed up the formatting (installed Windows XP on the new drive by mistake, when all I wanted was an NTFS partition) I remembered Papa would've got it right first time (use FDISK from the Windows 98 startup disks - not the Windows 95 one 'cos it can't support FAT32 or partitions above 2GB - and I couldn't even find the stack of startup floppies).

Couldn't find the old modem either when I tried to get the internet connection to work. Screwed up the connections too when I disconnected the mess of phone wires. 3 desktops to one router stuffed chock-full of microfilters and 3-to-1 & 2-to-1 connectors is a recipe for trouble. He'd have remembered how to do it; only he knew precisely which wire was connected to the phone line, which one to the router, to the comps, to each other.

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Now I realise how much I miss him. I always depended on him to figure out what screwed up in all the computers I had. Only he'd have the patience to work out what was wrong. He knew everything about all the hardware, where all the papers and spare chips and drives and wires were kept, all that kind of stuff. All I know about computers I learnt from him.

Man... he kept my life running and I never knew it. Even last December he brought me down to the computer fair at Expo to get new RAM chips, just a couple of days before he got admitted to hospital, really, really sick. By then he was struggling against the cold and the crowds in the exhibition hall and trying his best to keep up with me as we waded through the whole mess of people. I only realise it now, and it hits real hard.

Damn I'm emo now. I miss him terribly.