Sunday, March 07, 2010

Diseased

Aaagh!

I had a post all set to go for today when the upstairs laptop suddenly began hacking up bits of lung and collapsed on the floor. Okay, not so much, but what it DID do was begin throwing out all sorts of messages from one of those fake "antivirus" programs that is a virus itself. We had one last month (something called "Game Sushi") that was nasty but cleanable. This thing ("Vista AntiVirus") isn't. So the upstairs computer is in the shop getting purged and bled and I'm back down here with the poor old Victorola struggling with the failing keyboard and the dying graphics card.

I'm going to try and post the original Sunday post tonight, but bear with me. It's like 1977 around here, and the only thing I lack is punch cards.

I should add, to help you understand that I am as old as dirt, that my first computer lab assignment back in college (probably about 1977-78, I suspect) was running a simple statistics program. From punch cards. In Fortran 66.

Christ, I'm older than dirt.

Other than that, it's been a good Sunday. I laid the small stone patio in front (pictres to follow) and then my lovely bride took control of the littles so I could go putter around; I put the ribs down to marinate, went and bought some little Star Wars minis for the Peeper and I to play war with, picked up some Yellow Finns for the 'tatie bed, stopped off at Powell's and browsed the fiction, ate lunch and then home.

We all went to our old favorite Columbia Pool and then home for a slap-up meal of barbequed spareribs, new spring asparagus and rice. Mmmm. Things are winding down now towards bedtime. Hope you, too, had a good lazy sort of Sunday.

Minus the virus, of course.

5 comments:

Ael said...

Ah, did you ever drop your deck of cards while you were handing it to the operator?

I did once. Ever afterwards I always used the last 8 characters of the punch card to number them so I could sort them if I dropped them again.

Funny thing was, I never dropped a second deck.

Lisa said...

Sorry to hear of your computer woes, but that doesn't sound like a "lazy Sunday"! It does, however, sound like a good one.

Lisa said...

p.s. -- how's your poison oak? better, I hope.

FDChief said...

Ael: Worse - I pretty much threw the stack all over the mainframe room when I tripped. I never could find two of the cards (I had numbered them, at least, so I knew which two). What a pain in the ass.

Lisa: It was, and I realized that it wasn't quite as lazy as I'd thought when I woke up this morning sore in every limb - those stone pavers must be getting heavier than they were when I was in my thirties. Hmmm.

The poison oak has dried up but has left a very angry welt on my left hand, completed with scars from where I tore at it. I may not go into the woods without a biohazard suit again!

Lisa said...

It really is noxious stuff!