Wednesday, November 9, 2005 - An afternoon of Geekdom

Today I decided to tackle one of the things on my 'to do' list, now that I have all this free time. We have hade our old Pentium 133 sitting in the closet for some time now, which contains lots of photos from the last 5 years.

Ah this will take about an hour I thought and I'll get it done while my 2 year old is out of the way at his Mommy and me class.

So I fought to get the old PC and monitor out of the closet in our small apartment while various tools, extension cables, toys and god knows what else hindered me retreiving the old machine by tripping me up and falling on my head. Finally I got it set up on our kitchen table and was ready to burn the long lost photos onto CD. Next the CD ROM burner did not work and could not be found by Windows 98 despite powering up and ejecting, after spending over an hour taking the PC apart and checking the IDE cable still no joy.

 Onto plan B which was to transfer the photos via one of those little USB memory devices that are so darn handy........... when they work!!! Windows 98 couldn't find any drivers for that device..........

Plan C,  I'll connect to the internet and e-mail them to myself, then save them to our new PC.

Bollocks - Windows 98 could not recognize the DSL modem  or even connect via dial-up. Now pissed off yet determined I trecked off to Radio Shack to buy a USB cable so I could transfer the photos between the two machines.............. $43 for a fucking cable!! After transferring the photos I returned the cable to it's original packaging so I can return it for a refund tomorrow ( I would not have bothered if it was $20 or less as a cable should be).

So the simple task of transferring some photos took the best part of the day, thanks very much Bill Gates and all you other nerds who advertise your products with  phrases like " it's so easy " and " with just the click of a button".

It was worth it to see the photos again though, sometimes I think I have a really dull and boring life but in the photos from the last 5 years were;

1. Many pictures of our son's early months

2. The restorative progress of my Jaguar

3. Our dog having puppies and the puppies first few weeks of life.

4. Elina and my trip from LA to Seattle on the train Christmas 2001

5. My best mate from Brums visit  to LA and Las Vegas

6. Numerous  business trips I took to Asia and Europe.

Looks like I'll be posting  a few photos on BE soon.