At Least There Wasn't a Burning Smell
Thursday, July 14, 2011 at 2:40PM by T. Keegan Evans After walking the dog this morning I sat down at my desk to do my standard round of daily Internet browsing. Three clicks into what I swear were culturally significant and definitely Safe for Work RSS feeds, my entire screen froze except for the mouse pointer. A couple of hard restarts later, the whole damn thing won't boot past the loading screen and I'm googling the problem on my phone.
Best guess, my video card called it quits. This is actually much better than my first guess, which was that my hard drive crashed within 20 gigabytes of completing a backup with Carbonite and those 20 gigabytes likely held the photo library that was really the main reason I was running a backup in the first place.
As a gamer, this isn't all bad news. It's an excuse to put a fancy new graphics card into my desktop (which got fancy new RAM last year when Starcraft 2 was released) and dabble in the nerdgasm that comes with that sort of thing.
But as a guy who is really really trying to be better about impulsive uses of cash for technology upgrades (and splitting 8s), I'm not a fan. Fortunately I'll have some time to boil this around internally as I'll be on my 2 weeks of annual Reserve training and not lugging my desktop computer with me.
Because I've grown up a bit.
And I'll bring my iPad.