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Bon Journal

Victim of technology

Was Murphy a genius or was his Law a universal phenomenon?

I shake my head at the technological problems I've been having ever since I became a job-free citizen.

With what I thought was foresight, I had upgraded my four year old PC. Since yesterday I've been having "buffering" problems. My keyboard and mouse would freeze every minute for 30 seconds. My Windows XP was smart enough to detect that I had a buffering problem and suggested that I download an update.

While that was going on, I had to tell myself to count and wait. Then I went to my website and found that it wasn't accessible. Coincidentally I had received emails from Internet Seer informing me that my website was not reachable.

Thankful for my engineering education, I was aware that my website and my PC were separate problems. But I couldn't understand why these problems happened at the same time.

What this meant, of course, was that I couldn't work at my usual pace, I couldn't update my site, and visitors might be turned away. Last week my site was down, but this was due to my web host putting a heavy hitting new site on my server. What's the problem this week?

Such problems are enough to make me want to go back to work. At least I don't have to personally diagnose the problem. It gets fixed. I can abdicate. Maybe that's why people work in an office. The computer help desk is the golden gem. I don't know how I can live without it.

11 July 2002 Thursday

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