Since I started this blog, I have never missed a month. Sadly, May 2010 passed with nary a post from me.
Do I have any excuses? Sure, but when you set a goal for yourself of posting at least once a month, there really are no excuses.
Right now I am facing another unprecedented situation, which at least provides fodder for this post: three out of five computing devices in our house are broken in some way and I am trying to get them up and running again on a very tight budget.
The PS3 won’t read Blu-Ray discs, which means none of the purchased games work and it won’t play Blu-Ray movies. This has been an ongoing situation for several months. It is frustrating for the whole family, but mostly for the gamers. Off-warranty cost to fix it: $150.00. According to a buddy of mine, I can get a brand new PS3 with more hard drive capacity for $199.99. Needless to say we’re not fixing the old one.
The desktop upstairs (which I was using as a test and printer server as well as a media server) has given up the ghost. It doesn’t output a video signal anymore. I will have to spend more time troubleshooting it before declaring a dead video card and not some weird software problem (like a video driver suddenly not initializing).
My wife’s netbook boots up and responds but offers no Xandros Desktop so it is pretty much useless to her. (Xandros is a Linux distribution that came with the Acer Eee PC 1000 and served my wife’s needs just fine until now. Previous attempts to get my family to use Linux were met with wails of despair that Windows was the only way to go.)
So I am writing this blog post on my main desktop, which I have built and re-built a few times over the past few years. And my business laptop is still working perfectly (which is expected since it is only a few months old).
With my new job, I am far too busy to justify fiddling around with technology like I used to. Learning the quirks of different software installations was part of my job before; now it is just a frustrating distraction. Still, I will tackle each problem with an eye on spending as little money as possible. I am at a stage now where it seems like I have slightly more time than money, which makes my missing a whole month of posting even less forgivable.