Something stirs in the rubble....

It's me.

I'm writing this Monday night on my backup laptop. My main PC is down. My main laptop is down. My three old experimental/sacrificial systems are down. Worse, so is my brand new one.

Oh, and I cooked a 1TB external drive along the way, too.

The Tech Gods must be angry.

It's the outcome of a series of separate simultaneous experiments--- a hardware upgrade and cannibalization, moving from aging XP-based hardware to new Vista-based hardware; a quiet-cooling experiment with a new "bare bones" experimental system; and a test of the Windows 7 beta.

Windows 7 was the worst of it. It ate a hard drive. Mangled the boot sector so badly--- but subtly!--- that I couldn't reinstall Vista or XP: their setup disks alarmingly reported "No hard drive found" even though the BIOS and other OSes *could* see the hard drive.

Lots of manual tweaking; lots of pointy-head, pocket-protector excursions (including having to a do a full-disk Linux format and install---Kubuntu 8.10, if you're interested--- as part of the recovery process).

I also had a column due this weekend for the Windows Secrets newsletter. As my various systems winked out one by one, I kept retreating into older and smaller systems to stay ahead of the destruction and to be able to keep working.

But the gremlins followed me from system to system, leaving only dead silicon in their wake. I'd retreat further, setting up full shop in an even simpler, smaller, older system. My writing output dropped. Online research went slower and slower. The hours ticked by. I contemplated writing and sending in the column by telegraph or semaphore.

And still the gremlins came.

Late last night, it was like a scene out of Tolkien:

There I stood, my back against the deadline, its cold unyielding surface reminding me I had nowhere to run. I surveyed the landscape, littered with dead and dying PCs, and Lo! There they were. A horde of Gremlins. Vast. Unstoppable.

Sensing my fear, they pick up speed and sweep towards me over the cables and cooling fans, wheeling around the heat sinks and crashing headlong across the copper-traced fresh green of my motherboards: a ravening Gremlin army of Delays and Troubles, feral eyes aglitter at the scent of fresh geek. I hear their guttural cry: "Glitch! Glitch!"

As if in answer, a Common Sense calls softly in the distance, urging me to bed and head-clearing rest. But I had no time to listen. I was on a mission.

On they came, an unending stream, and not just Gremlins! An evil army undulated to the horizon, an unbroken wave of Bugs, Errors, Blunders, Boo-boos, Deviations, Errata, Failures, Faults, Flaws, Goofs, Inaccuracies, Lapses, Miscalculations, Miscues, Misjudgments, Missteps, Misunderstandings, Omissions, Oversights, Screw-ups, Stumbles and Slips.

I fought them all. But I was losing.

After midnight, when fatigue started to get the better of me, the gremlins called in even more reinforcements: a phalanx of fresh Fuckups rode in on horseback to join the fray.

Worse, I had been deceived. Some of my Bestideas turned out to be Fuckups in disguise.

I was doomed. There I stood, my back hard against a deadline with no further retreat possible. But, like Leonidas at Thermopylae, I was determined to finish the day carrying my keyboard, or be carried on it.

During a break in the battle I stabbed a few wounded gremlins and ate an apple.

I told myself to remember:

This. Is. BLOGGING!!!!




OK, OK.

I did end up literally pulling an all-nighter last night. I napped a bit on the sofa at dawn this morning while doing the umpteenth reformat of a hard drive. It's been a long day.

I'm still on my backup laptop but I finally got my main laptop to boot Vista normally about an hour ago, and I'm now restoring the system from backups.

Almost everything will get working again, and the parts that won't were OK to lose, which is why I was experimenting with them.

But man, I haven't had a beta bite me this badly in 10 years. (Caution, my friends: there be dragons in that download.) And I don't know how long it's been since I ran into so many glitches at once.

It's like I opened Schroedinger's box, and a whole damn litter died.

Remember, don't try this computer savagery at home. I'm a trained professional. I know exactly what--- hey, wait a minute. Does that smell like burning insulation to you?