"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways."
Not sure Elizabeth Barrett Browning had a beer in mind when penning this opening line, but she might have. Whatever, but after a long, tiring - and often tiresome - weekend then that's exactly how I felt about his particular bottle of Michelob. Not withstanding spending from 9 am to 4 pm up on my roof on Saturday, plus another 3 hours on Sunday, painting a chimney stack replaced earlier in the week, I wasted countless hours trying to a) get my NAS disk to be visible again on my home network and b) recovering my wife's laptop from an assault of Spartan ferocity by various Trojan and Spyware viruses. Fixing a) ultimately required me to update the firmware on the Buffalo LinkStation I use, itself a challenge as, in order to do so, you first need network connectivity which, if it was working, would mean I didn't have a problem in the first place. Fixing b) was only accomplished by invoking the nuclear option and reinstalling Windows. This would have been easier if I had the original recovery or install disk, which I didn't, and so instead I had to use a "clean" XP install from a copy I had sitting around the house. Of course, life's never quite that easy in Microsoft land and it was only after about two hours that I again had something that would boot.
To get me through all this, I kept the promise of a nice, cold, frosty beer uppermost in my mind, with access only being granted when I was done. Coupled with that the prospect of drinking it in front of the Australian F1 GP and ... well, you get the picture.
I got there in the end, but it was a hell of a long journey. Still, it was good when I got there, so good in fact I had to drink another just to be sure. Even weekends like that one have an upside.
Not sure Elizabeth Barrett Browning had a beer in mind when penning this opening line, but she might have. Whatever, but after a long, tiring - and often tiresome - weekend then that's exactly how I felt about his particular bottle of Michelob. Not withstanding spending from 9 am to 4 pm up on my roof on Saturday, plus another 3 hours on Sunday, painting a chimney stack replaced earlier in the week, I wasted countless hours trying to a) get my NAS disk to be visible again on my home network and b) recovering my wife's laptop from an assault of Spartan ferocity by various Trojan and Spyware viruses. Fixing a) ultimately required me to update the firmware on the Buffalo LinkStation I use, itself a challenge as, in order to do so, you first need network connectivity which, if it was working, would mean I didn't have a problem in the first place. Fixing b) was only accomplished by invoking the nuclear option and reinstalling Windows. This would have been easier if I had the original recovery or install disk, which I didn't, and so instead I had to use a "clean" XP install from a copy I had sitting around the house. Of course, life's never quite that easy in Microsoft land and it was only after about two hours that I again had something that would boot.
To get me through all this, I kept the promise of a nice, cold, frosty beer uppermost in my mind, with access only being granted when I was done. Coupled with that the prospect of drinking it in front of the Australian F1 GP and ... well, you get the picture.
I got there in the end, but it was a hell of a long journey. Still, it was good when I got there, so good in fact I had to drink another just to be sure. Even weekends like that one have an upside.
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