Daily Report: A Day That Didn't Start Well Or Badly

We woke up today to sunshine... although it must have just stopped raining within the last hour as the tiles and pavement were all still wet: 48 hours of precipitation in a country where a 2-hour rainstorm is considered substantial, 30 minutes the average.

I got up to my office and turned on my work computer. Nothing. No go. No familiar click-sigh sound of electronic redivivus. I crawled to the stygian underbelly of my jungle perch where my computer lives and unplugged/replugged everything and tried anew. This time I got the click-sigh; this time I got the login screen. I typed my name and password, and then wandered off with my coffee to watch the sunshine dry out the neighborhood. When I came back, my computer was off again. No click-sigh with any further attempts.

Without this computer — not "without A computer" but "without THIS computer" — I'm unemployed.

I guessed that the 110% humidity of the last 48 hours somehow killed my power supply. I unplugged the computer, opened up the case, and found 7 years of dust bunnies living inside... 7 years of open-window office, floor-dwelling, smoke-ash-cat-dog-air-breathing. I could barely see the motherboard.

Since there is no computer store in Jasaan, I decided to take my computer to Ron Schreuder's internet café and clean it out using his blower, and try unplugging-replugging everything on the inside (not just the power cord on the outside). I went there, blew every dust bunny to kingdom come, unplugged the power supply to the mother board, unplugged the memory, the expansion cards, the processor, and pretty much anything else that looked pluggable, and then tried the computer again.

It worked fine. I still have a job.

I spent pretty much the rest of the day in front of my computer. I spent my lunch break randomly surfing the internet. (We don't "surf" anymore do we? We don't even use that term anymore. Now we stride purposefully on our daily internet walks; we know where we are going and don't deviate or let the waves of the internet guide us. Well, I do "surf"... sometimes... like today.)

I didn't even know it was Thanksgiving today until I got an e-mail reply from my company's medical Q&A team that started off, "Good morning! Happy Thanksgiving!"

p.s. I finally got up that video I mentioned in the post below.