Practicalmadness

Due to an unfortunate...unpleasantness involving this, that and the other, my beloved laptop has been out of commission for four days. It's back now, but saving it required Herculean feats of check card-lifting and much stress as I battled the twin devils of jerky tech support staff and the far deeper horror of the EULA. For you see, no tech may lay their hands upon an unlicensed computer for fear of being torn limb from limb by ravenous lawyers.

The fix involved buying a copy of Windows 2000 Professional (uh, I mean, buying a new copy, as I would never dream of running unlicensed software...) after attempts to fix everything using a set of floppy disks (yes, they still exist) proved ineffective. Of course, I would learn later that I could have fixed it easily that first night, with the floppies, but then I would not have been sufficiently punished for my foolishness. I have now had to run the Emergency Repair process four times, CHK the DISK once, reinstall twice and once I could get into my computer's filesystem to save three years of work files (having converted my drive to NTFS, the Windows 2000-native demon filesystem, I could not use a Windows 98 disk for anything but a coaster), reformat my hard drive and start over.

In the process I lost:

• Microsoft Word 2000 • Adobe Illustrator • Macromedia Flash • All of my fonts (only because I forgot to back them up)

Fortunately I had recently taken steps to ensure that the software most integral to Practicalness was backed up onto CD.

What have we learned? When a buddy shows up with a pirated operating system, don't let him leave town in the middle of the night until you've taken the ten minutes to make a gahdamned copy of the CD.