Off Topic With Ashley

That Sunday, I rode up the driveway and sighed an exasperated sigh of exhaustion in the face of defeat.

Someone had decided to shut the gate — MY gate — so I had to get off the bike after what, four hours of pedalling, and open the damn thing again. I don’t understand what kind person shuts someone else’s gate, it’s quite possibly the same kind of person who throws religious leaflets over the fence and expects it will lead to something good and wholesome. Unfortunately, shutting other peoples gates lead to no such thing, and I cursed under my breath as I swung my useless, rubbery leg over the bicycle and hobbled over to un-latch the damn thing.

They’d latched it, fantastic.

I put the bike away, hauled myself up the stairs, patted the dog briefly before collapsing in front of my desk. I turned on my laptop, and it turned itself off again shortly after.

“That’s odd,” I thought to myself, and as I watched it turned itself back on again. I was momentarily pissed off, but quickly put it out of my mind.

I cooked sausages for dinner, and then went to bed.

The next morning, when I turned my laptop on, it did it again.

“What is going on here?” I wondered as the screen flickered on and off. A buzzing sound accompanied the errant screen, then after a moment it corrected itself and turned on again. Dejected, I concluded that my laptop might not have long left to live.

I started to prepare for the worst, which was quite lucky because within another two hours, the little flourescent tube in the screen drew one final breath and flicked out for good.

I have to admit, I was quite pissed off by this point. Namely because the laptop itself has had enough hardware failure I’ve practically replaced everything in it, but also because it’s a franken-piece-of-shit that’s probably not worth spending any more money on. Not that I have any, anyway. I’m in the worst place I’ve been in my entire life, and now the very tool I use to (not) make a living has fucked up beyond repair, just two years out of the factory.

I had a moment of anger, a moment of apathy, about three minutes of sheer and utter despair, and took a moment to shed a tear for where the last twenty-three years has got me. Then I took the hard disk out of my laptop, slotted it into the recently-upgraded HTPC, and booted back into my desktop, just like that. Linux is fantastic.

It’s been a fun evening of finding things I can’t do any more.

• I can no longer chat while watching TV.
• I can no longer even time shift TV without my HTPC.
• I can no longer connect to my phone via Bluetooth, it’s cables all the way from here.
• I can no longer blog in bed. Tonight I’m still awake at half past twelve listening to the Arctic Monkeys at my desk, hoping the words will soon end so that I can take off all of my clothes and go to sleep.
• I can no longer enjoy music. The sound card in this machine is utter crap, and has clipping artefacts all through the high end.
• I can no longer blog on the train.
• I can no longer get out of the house to work.
• I can no longer use wi-fi.
• I can no longer transfer files easily to friends via their wi-fi.
• I can no longer work on my bean bag.
• I can no longer work on a picnic rug.
• Work and play have now been merged indelicately into the one corner of my bedroom, never to be separated again.
• I can no longer play games and do other things at the same time. It’s all or nothin’ now.
• I can no longer back up my files to my file server, because my file server’s in my file server so I can serve files from my… Yeah fuckit I don’t have a file server any more.
• I can’t watch shit I download on the TV.
• I can’t watch DVDs on the computer (yeah, it doesn’t have an optical drive.)
• I can’t afford to buy another stick of RAM, let alone a new machine. (This one has one gig. ONE GIGABYTE WTF?)

The laptop itself is probably fix-able, but it’s going to require an arsefuck of money I don’t have, and to be honest I’ll be happy to see the end of it. I’m back to the apathy stage, and I just don’t care any more.