Little gems rise from the ashes

PAIN

We never know how much we are addicted to something until we are deprived of it.  I have had that happen a couple of times in my life, to be deprived of something that I took for granted and then found how much a part of my life it inhabited.
I found myself in computer hell.  The anxiety I felt, the itchy feeling, the fidgeting that I experienced was on par with a minor opiate withdrawal.
My computer is my source of news, an outlet for my info addiction, entertainment,  communication,  as well. And all of a sudden it wasn’t there.  And I was adrift.

This particular lesson in life came when I was performing maintenance on my computer equipment. I have two laptops both Macs, one about four years old and one about two years old.  The older one is the warhorse that I used for most of my trip across the country a couple of years ago. The “A” key doesn’t work (a coffee spill in Memphis) then the shift keys gave up along with the enter key. I solved all of this in creative ways but finally bought a $10 USB keyboard and found a good used  Mac Book to take up my computing needs.

I use four external USB hard drives that backup data and warehouse the stuff I have not gotten to yet. That’s a bunch! About 1.5T. On my laptop alone, I have over 10,000 songs in my iTunes library, 50 audio books,  probably 150 e-books,  and about 50 movies.  I have 3 three  ipod nanos with different content on each. I watch no TV, listen to no radio ( I think I have a portable radio somewhere besides the one in the van)
SO my computer equipment takes a higher priority in my life that in most peoples.
I try to keep it all cleaned up and purring nicely inside and out. I was defragging my laptops 500G hard drive when WONK. The screen went dark and the machine froze.  I felt my stomach churned and I tried to figure out what happened.  It took three days to resurrect the laptop.  Not a hardware problem thankfully but all the system software drivers were toast.  I had to download a 7 Gig system and that takes time over borrowed Wi-Fi connections. Then figure out how to make a boot disk on the old system that was 3 generations of software older than my ruined one.

Pleasure

It wasn’t pretty but I finally got it going, the electronic equivalent of a push start with a cross-wired ignition. Then I took the opportunity to look at some of the stuff I had on the machine that I forgot about.
So, I decided to take a couple of jewels out of this mess and share them with you.  These are just some random samples of stuff on my machine, kind of the dust bunnies of my room.
This is old but it was recently accessed as I was remembering Beatles tunes with a friend. I dug this out and shared it with them and then with another, it was neat to see it again even if you saw it years ago. This was viral before the word viral was defined. It is a YouTube clip of a juggler named Chris Bliss. Chris does stand up for corporate activities and then closes his act with this juggling routine that he does to the Beatles songs Gloden Slumbers/Carry that Weight. Great act with Great music that reminds us that the Beatles were a lot more than the Musac tunes we hear today. Here is your link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8f8drk5Urw

Then there was the chalk. Street Chalk = artists extraordinaire. The depth and aspects of this art is amazing. Here are some examples but a simple Google image search keywords "Street Chalk Art" will keep you gawking for hours. This is all on flat sidewalks, proving perspective is everything. Check out some of the time lapse stuff.





Just amazing stuff I would like to see some of this sometime.



















Then there are the “Demotivator” posters kind of the Opposite of all those “Teamwork”  “Live your dreams”  “Achievement”  “Consistancy” posters that hang in corporate offices everywhere. Again here is a sample just Google “Demotivator Posters” and enjoy a few chuckles.  I have about fifty stored on my machine to help make my point in e-mails and some forums that I post on.

Ahh yes people of Wal-Mart. Google "People of Wal-Mart" click on photos and see what the "not so beautiful" beautiful people are up to. Here is a sample.

And those pics reminded me of my chicken finger sucking,  lip smacking "Slurp Sisters". Well it happened again and I stared at them but they didn't stop making the disgusting slurping sounds. So I moved but I did however, pull out my phone and capture them practicing there eating habits and them exiting. Here they are:

OK I guess this is long enough, I started with computer Jonesing, then reconnected and rediscovered pure gold buried under a ton of data in the mines of my hard disks. So just remember: