Rome Burns, I Fiddle

One of my favorite TV programs, Dead Like Me, featured a young girl who was killed by hitting with a toilet seat from the Mir spacecraft as it returned to earth. Except, instead of dying, she was drafted into the ranks of the undead and became a (grim) reaper, someone whose job it is to pull the souls from the bodies of those about to die.

Worse, this reaping job didn't pay, so she was forced to survive just like the rest of us and had to get a job and home. The job she took was the one she'd had for one day, working at a temp agency (though now, of course, with a new name to go along with her disguised appearance -- the undead appear different to the living so they don't freak out). The point of all this is that her boss had cameras all over her home that fed her website, Getting Things Done with Dolores.

People would watch Dolores do things, get things done, everything from jigsaw puzzles to laundry, and Dolores was always on the move and took suggestions from her viewers.

Today, incredibly, I got something done. Before the calendar turned to February, I took down the outdoor Christmas lights, a much easier task than I anticipated. It's always that way, and I should make a note to remember that next year.

What had been preventing me from doing it earlier is that I'm blessed with myopia and was able to forget about it except for a brief time each evening when I turned on the lights. Then I'd remember, but it was always too dark to go hauling ladders around, much less climbing them and stretching to reach all the anchors I used to hold the lights up.

Even better, late as I am, I'm not the last person on my block to take down my lights.

The reason I thought of it this morning is because I'm getting ready to make what's possibly a VERY BIG MISTAKE.

You see, this new computer game is coming out and my current system, naturally, can't handle it. While I made a great effort a few years to clean up my computer room (yes, a woman was involved), I still have a great number of computer parts and skeletons piled up, and I'm getting ready to see if I can upgrade.

A couple years back I panicked and bought a brand new computer from CompUSA, something I hadn't done in about fifteen years. I don't recall inspired that, but I think it was the inability of my W98 machine to generate any sound. I now have two running boxes, the old W98 machine for writing and porn, and another box that can run either WXP or linux (SuSE). I use the SuSE part of my setup the most, since that's the only one I trust on the Internet, and the WXP portion is mostly for gaming.

Anyway, I've found a motherboard that's much better than the one I got with this cheap system, and I intend to install it. I've done that dozens of times over the years (nothing like games to require upgrades), but I've never done it with a linux machine. I fully expect both the WXP and linux halfs to freak out when they discover all the new hardware.

What concerns me is that I don't know if I can get the linux part to run again, even if I can get the CPU successfully moved to the new board. That concerns me because I remember it being a trouble before, mostly because of the cooling. My greater fear is that not only will the new system fail to work, but that I won't be able to undo the changes.

I can see it now: install new board and try to locate all the necessary software and drivers to get it to work. I fully expect WXP to work, but not SuSE, which results in my putting the old board back in. Then, even after SuSE rediscovers all the old hardware, parts of the old and parts of the new are both installed, and it still won't work.

I'm not sure what all's involved with a linux upgrade, so if I'm offline for a while, you'll know why.

PS - It's now just after noon, too late (?) to work on it today. Maybe tomorrow...