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The Church of the FSM

Ah, you’ve probably surfed through this site at one point or another. Regardless, I want this, the best of all possible graphs, sitting in my blog for when I need to look at it.

CNN.com – The most ‘representative’ state: Wisconsin – Jul 27, 2006

Mississippi’s #50! Again! Can’t even break the top 49 in made-up stats! You know where Mississippi would place in a “Which state is most like Mississippi” poll? Number 50! Beating out Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia by a rat’s hair!

You know what? All the shit that’s happening in the middle east right now? It’s all going to blow over. Seriously. I can’t get excited by it. Of course bad things happen; they happen all the time there. Doesn’t matter what the US does, bad things will happen there. Doesn’t matter that Condi and George are incredible assholes, they don’t matter to Israel or Syria or the Hezbollah.

The fact that Condi has decided that the conflict should continue because a ceasefire won’t accomplish anything? No one over there cares what she says.

It’s all going to blow over. And I think one reason why it’s going to have no lasting effect is that everyone world-wide will breathe such a sigh of relief when we elect a real president in ‘08 that we–the US–will have to behave like enormous dicks to fritter that feeling of relief away.

I guarantee it. Take it from me, the guy who lives in a world in which Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry were all presidents. And damn good ones, too.

I’ve got everything back. Everything except an updated “contacts” list in Outlook. The one I’ve had to settle for is several months old, so it lacks only a couple updates.

All my email was saved. All my work stuff was found. I found the contents of my desktop in a file called “userdata” in the file recovery program. In Windows Explorer, the userdata file contained a bunch of nothing. Weird also that a search in the file recovery program returned no .pst files; I had to manually find those bad boys.

Let this be a lesson. If I learn nothing else from this near-fiasco, I’ve learned…okay, I’ve learned nothing. I’ll keep not saving everything on a regular basis, and I’ll keep clicking buttons that I have no business clicking. And that’s just the way it is. Courage.

Ren: You fool! Don’t press that button! That’s the History Eraser button!

Stimpy: So what’ll happen?

Ren: That’s just it! We don’t know! Maybe something bad; maybe something good! I guess we’ll never know. Cause you’re going to guard it. You won’t touch it, will you?

I’d like to preface this by stressing that I’m not usually an idiot. Usually I can feed and clothe myself with practically no help. I can operate a car with a stickshift and successfully troubleshoot the fridge icemaker when it starts bogarting the cubes. I read books with big words. So when, yesterday, I partially reformatted my hard disk by mistake, well, I got to thinking about the many, many things I can do that don’t cause unbearable hardship and grief. Washing my own hair, for example.

Everytime I boot up my computer, a momentary window appears that allows several different pre-boot options. Everybody’s pc does that, of course, unless it’s set not to. I’d always escaped out of the window (to save those three or four seconds that elapse before booting continues on its own). Prior to yesterday.

This newest computer has been a rock. Unshakeable. I’ve never needed to tinker in any way with the boot process; Windows comes up, like the sun, and I go about my business. But I’ve idly wondered, as I’ve watched it warm up, what some of the pre-boot functions called. This computer has a different BIOS from my last machine, so the options were different. “Safe Mode” was there, of course. But so was something called “Fastbuild,” and something else called “System Recovery.”

On my last machine (that’s sitting on my son’s desk), an automatic disk scan occurred if the computer shut down abnormally. But this new computer has never once (at least obviously) performed any kind of diagnostic on itself after a bad shutdown. I wondered–as I waited for the machine to boot–why that was. Did it need to? Sure it did, if only to identify bad sectors and cauterize them. Maybe there was some setting in either “Fastbuild” or “System Recovery” that was switched off. Maybe I should switch it on, just to make certain that the hard drive knew where its bad sectors were. In order to make this rock-solid machine even more rock-solid.

So I hit “ctl-F” to enter Fastbuild. Turned out that was where the BIOS settings could be manipulated. I didn’t really want to mess with those, because it takes a lot of trial and error to get things right in there, and I was just idly curious. So I exited that and clicked on “System Recovery.” Ah! Here it was; a couple paragraphs with several exclamation points. The last paragraph stated that, if I did choose to recover the system, none of my data files would be harmed. That was good. The first paragraph was about two column inches long and looked boring, so I didn’t read it. I already knew everything I needed to know: if I recovered the system, nothing bad would happen.

I pressed “yes.” Another screen came up to tell me that certain things were wrong with my computer and the program would continue. A friendly little progress bar appeared at the top. “Time to go” read 18 minutes. That was good, too, as a final check. I mean, how much damage could a program do in 18 minutes? I left to make myself a sandwich. It was a good, successful sandwich.

Eighteen minutes later–right on time–the program completed and rebooted the computer all by itself. The usual boot process started, the usual pre-Windows windows appeared, and then something weird happened, as I ate my sandwich: A “Welcome to Windows” splash came up, followed by a sexy woman’s voice saying “Welcome to Windows.” That was odd. But even odder was the next screen, my desktop. It was barren. Barren except for an “AOL offer” icon, a “Help & Support” icon, and a “User’s Guides” icon. Barren as the Gobi Desert, if the Gobi Desert contained only computer icons, and only three of them.

“Christ Almighty,” I said. Also “Great Fucking Shit” and “Oh my fucking God.” Another screen superimposed itself on my cracked and bleeding desktop, wondering if I had a printer, and if so, where was it? “You’ve got to be fucking bagging me,” I added.

I canceled out of all the prompts in order to call up “My Computer” and take a look at my C: drive. Things were… things were still there! Outlook…there! Winpatrol…there! Thank God! Then I clicked over to HP-owner desktop in the file tree. There! But…where was everything? WHERE WAS EVERY FUCKING THING?

Calm down, calm down. Surely it’s still all there, I said to myself. I’d found things that wouldn’t be there if the drive had been completely turned back to its factory state; surely the rest of my stuff was there somewhere. So I searched for the names of files that I knew resided on my desktop and nowhere else. Things like my “Northern Exposure” download file and my “pa55word5″ file. Not…..there! Gone! Christ on a hatstick!

ALL the critical data files on my desktop–files that “system recovery” told me would still be there after I recovered the system–gone!

I clicked Outlook up to make sure all my email archives still existed. Outlook requested the serial code before it would initialize. Of course I didn’t have it; it used to be in the “Serial Codes” text file on my now-pulverized desktop! Same thing with Excel, same thing with Word. I searched for .pst archives, because surely they were still there, with all my correspondence. Gone! It must save to the muthafuckin HP-Owner Documents & Settings file! What about my work file, with all the stuff that I painstakingly entered by hand over literally a hundred hours the last year? Not there! Must’ve been in the muthafuckin HP-Owner Documents & Settings file! For the fuck of Buddha!

Like I said, usually I’m not an idiot. Usually I’m pretty cautious when it comes to my computer. I do have some backup files spread out on my kids’ computers, but they’re almost a year old. So a year’s worth of puttering and writing and squirreling away links and fiddling with my computer to get it just so, to make it the rock-solid computer of my dreams, is gone. It’s like a fire swept through my house. A very persnickety fire that charcoaled only things I’ve touched in the past few months.

I’ve got a file recovery program running in the background right now; maybe it’ll find a few odds and ends that I can work with, I don’t know.

And I know it’s all my fault, too. That’s probably the worst part. If I’d only bothered to read the first paragraph of the System Recovery screen, maybe things would be different. Maybe I’d be driving to the grocery store, shifting gears like all get out, feeling good. I don’t know.

I still make a good muthafuckin sandwich. Now, if you’ll excuse me, #$% ^**@-$%%&?? *%&#$^%; #$$? % #@@ #$&&?-$%??!!@.

Colbert loses it from massdestraction.com (now from ectoblog, in order to remove the irritating massdestraction logo. It’s a realmedia file, but I couldn’t find anything else mpg file.) You’ve probably seen it, but I hadn’t. There’s something about great comics breaking character that’s hilarious.

“Stephen, I have to tell you, that story all sounds pretty gay.”

“Not gay John, aristocratic. It’s a different culture than ours.”

“And what’s different about it?”

“Mainly how gay it is. John.”

CNN.com – Mystic mushrooms spawn magic event – Jul 11, 2006

Yesterday a stranger-woman at work came up to me and said “You look just like this guy who used to work here.” [hmyeswellhrmphchortle] A couple minutes later I noticed her across the room pulling somebody aside and pointing at me. Her head bobbed, her friend’s head bobbed, and they smiled in agreement.

I think this has happened to me three times in my life. “You are the spitting image of Joe Blow! Isn’t he the spitting image of Joe Blow??” I don’t know how often it happens to other people; I can’t recall ever having personally witnessed it happening, and I can’t recall ever inflicting it on anybody. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe my face is so plastic and ordinary that it reminds people of other people more often than other people’s faces do.

It’s disconcerting working with people who think I look like somebody else. What kind of guy was he? Did he represent my body and facial features properly? Was he funny but reserved? Was he a hard worker and fairly competent?

Or was he a complete asshole? Do I have to overcome the impression made by my doppelganger on the people around him lest I be deemed an incompetent shithead by association?

You know sometimes that happens: one has to overcome impressions and prejudices squatting inside somebody’s skull that have no business being associated with you, but are anyway. And you also know that sometimes the thing squatting inside his skull is so large that you won’t be able to divert it by clean living alone. As long as your physical description matches the template, you will be unfairly tarred.

It’s why you don’t see anyone walking around with Hitler mustaches anymore.

I hope I won’t be forced to shave.