It's Dai Time

Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Category: year26 (Page 84 of 92)

I posted an entry each day during my 26th year of life.

Day 33: oops aftermath

March 16, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I lost our C: drive, meaning all our applications and application data is gone.  Luckily, all our documents, including financial stuff, photos, music, and video were on my backup drive that survived the ill-fated encounter.

I reinstalled XP and have everything in working condition now and am slowly installing the necessary programs back onto the machine.

I’m not quite sure why I felt so sad and upset about the whole thing.  Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I’m worried about my mom’s surgery.  Perhaps it was the feeling of losing control over one of the few things over which I should always have control: a machine.  A machine that I, incidentally, spent four years learning about.

I feel better today.  Katie made me some mac and cheese and bought me some root beer last night.  I ate a bag of peanuts at work this morning.  I have some NPR podcasts on my iPhone.

One week into our vegetable garden excursion in our backyard, we have no visible sprouts.  Yet!

I’m a few books into Watchmen.  So far, I like it.

I also played a bunch of Prince of Persia this weekend – the new one.  It was pretty and easy and calming.  It’s nice to play something like that every once in a while and I earned a ridiculous number of achievements in only one weekend.

I still want to learn watchmaking at some point in my life.

And I feel like I haven’t been to enough buffets lately.

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Day 32: oops

March 15, 2009 / / 0 Comments

This morning, I managed to completely destroy Windows XP by attempting to uninstall SP3 to fix a Windows Update issue I was having.

The uninstall starting asking for the location of a bunch of files and when I wanted to cancel the uninstall, it kept going and deleted a bunch of critical Windows files instead. So now, the machine will no longer start XP. Great.

I take most of the blame on myself, but I’m still angry and frustrated and writing this on my iPhone, so this is all you get today.

Day 31: distracted

March 14, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Katie got a haircut yesterday and I didn’t say anything about it until today, and only after she brought it up.  I’m pretty sure I noticed it several times, but it just didn’t click in my head.  I’m sure this costs me a few Good Husband points.

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Both of us are flying out to New York/New Jersey next Wednesday evening to be with my mom, who’s going in for a (hopefully routine) operation on Thursday.  I won’t go into details here, but if you want to send any prayers or happy thoughts her way, I’d appreciate it.

I’m at work, clearing out some bugs and looking for new ones, but my thoughts are elsewhere.

On my mom, on Katie’s haircut, on a certain doorknob we have at home, on my Xbox’s drive that seems to stop working once a week or so, on the fact that our kitty will chew through plastic to eat our CostCo muffins.

I’m trying to start work on a script for a short YouTube series that I can film easily, but it’s harder than it seems.  I need to sketch out an overall summary of it before I just start writing.  But, I think it’ll be great when I’m done with it.

In celebration of pi day, EA provided us with some pies.  It’s the little things that count.

I think I want some mac and cheese later today.

Day 30: financial crisis

March 13, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I just watched last night’s Daily Show episode, where Jon Stewart takes it pretty badly to Jim Cramer (who was to me, until very recently, just that crazy guy on that one CNBC show).  But the entire episode felt like relief – like Jon Stewart was venting for all of us who don’t understand why we as taxpayers are being stuck with these huge bills for a crisis that we didn’t create.

Or did we?  We recently took out what I consider to be a very reasonable mortgage and Wells Fargo (our bank and mortgage lender) did a pretty exhaustive check of our financial standing.

But, if several years ago, a bank had come to us and told us we could get into a house we really liked with a bad loan, would we have known it was a bad loan?  I’m sure there are people who game the system, but I’d suspect that the majority of average Americans wouldn’t understand that a particular mortgage is unrealistic until it’s too late.

Regardless, the damage is done, and something has to happen.  The American banking system is too important to fail so either the government has to pump a lot of money into the system to keep them afloat or house prices will have to make a dramatic and sudden rebound.  Or the government will keep stuffing smaller amounts of money into the system until housing prices rebound.  Assuming they ever reach the levels before the crisis within a reasonable amount of time, which is not a small assumption.

I’ll stop here, because I don’t want to seem like an expert on what’s going on, but I’d urge anybody who has a few hours and wants to understand what’s going on to check out these three This American Life episodes, which do a great job of spelling out the causes and consequences of the crisis in a way that didn’t require any economics classes:

You can listen to all of them for free online and I felt a lot better afterwards, knowing that I at least can understand the basics of one of the largest and scariest things to ever happen to our world in my lifetime.  This financial crisis is a bit like diabetes; it’s not something that affects my day-to-day life yet, but I know that any day I could wake up and find that things are no longer fine.

If I got diabetes and lost my house and job?  That’d be the worst.

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