Hey, hot baud! Mind if I give you a hard drive?

2003-10-17 - 8:19 a.m.

So, my new laptop is no longer pristine. I went and saved a document with the impressive title of "Plot." It's basically just an excercise I got off the web to help flesh out a plot for a novel. Since I'm going to be writing a novel next month, and since I only had a bare-bones character idea, I think it's prudent of me to start thinking about stuff like that.

I think I can handle an un-pristine laptop.

I was thinking about writing a more weighty entry today, but really the only thing with any weight on my mind right now is my relationship with Pookie, and in the light of day, I'm kind of not willing to go into that. Maybe later.

It's been just about 3 weeks since I had an alcoholic drink. I don't really want one. I think I may have found a foolproof way for me to dry up. I may have even topped my "Quit Smoking By Catching a Cold, Smoking a Million Cigarettes, and Becoming So Incapacitaed by Fever That You Won't Move For Three Days" method.

Also, I'm coming up on two years for this little journally thing. I may do another retrospective, though last year's retrospective was dull as hell to write (I hope not many of you bothered to read it). Maybe I'll just think about all of the accomplishments I've made in the last year or something. Bleh.

Oh! Oh! I wanted to talk about how freaky it was to actually buy a computer! It was a fascinatingly disturbing experience!

Basically, I know very little about computers. I know how to use them, I know some basic shortcuts and ways to do what I want. I can find games on the internet, and I can follow basic instructions. All those numbers and everything? Meh. I just guess that higher = better and leave the rest to the professionals.

Now, the store owner knows a lot about computers. He knows what all the numbers mean, and he knows how to make some numbers into better numbers. He's able to reminisce about old keyboard formats and can giggle with glee at the thought of getting an old but good model of some sort of computer.

Situations where I'm in a room with someone who has a vastly different area of expertise than I have are not that unusual for me, and I'm usually able to hold up my end of the conversation or, at the very least, follow the very, very basics of what's going on ("Ah, so Proffessor Plum is against using thermodynamic theory to explain the proton drift of the Hydrogen atom! He also has a nice tie."). By the end of my conversation with the computer guy I was consciously fighting to keep my eyes from looking glazed.

It's not that he wasn't being clear. I'm pretty sure that it's because he wasn't speaking English. I know he had a lot of the mannerisms I expect from a normal person - head nods, hand gestures, smiles - because I used these cues to maintain my part of the enterprise (He's smiling, so now I shall smile. He just said something that sounded like a declarative statement, so perhaps I should nod in agreement. Oh no! A slight frown! Quick: look like you were joking!), so I'm fairly certain he wasn't an alien or a robot (though you never can tell).

It was such an unusual experience, because it's really rare to have an entire realm of existence unfold in front of me. I was completely and unavoidably brought face to face with an aspect of my own ignorance.

I recommend this sort of experience to everyone, if only to keep us humble.

Cheers,

The Magus

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