Can We Stop At Stuckey's?
Decided to clean up the hard drive a little and get rid of some files that seem under used or superfluous and in doing so accidently deleted all my audio drivers, or something, I don't really know what I did, nor do I want to pretend that this was some sort of well thought out computer maintenance scheme by a person who goes about boldly and courageously taking care of business in a kick ass and take names fashion. This clean up was more like one of those actions that would come under the general heading of dangerously bored. These are the types of periods that were it a little warmer I would be out building a fire in a fire pit and throwing into it all the leftover pyrotechnic devices that weren't exploded in the foyer of the bighouse several months ago.
So I lost all sound on this computer and my first step after doing this was to convince myself that sound on a computer is not all that important. I can do without sound, I told myself. And I could, too, but after awhile it just seemed dumb to make this relatively minor sacrifice so I tried to download a driver that seemed like it might fit from a page officially sanctioned by Microsoft. But when I tried to install the driver my Microsoft driven OS informed me that the software was not certified and I that I would go to hell for my bold, ill-conceived actions. And then this computer crashed, a thing it rarely does. I rebooted and carried out the same ill-conceived process a couple more times before moving on to something else.
Oh, a Vaio recovery system. That looks promising. It informs me that I can restore my computer to its fresh out of the store original settings or I can pick a date on a calendar and restore to whatever the settings were at that time. I don't need a recovery disc or any of the original softwares, which is great news because I would not have them anyway. The very idea of this frankly blows my mind. I know that deleted things on a hard drive are not actually deleted but just stored out of the way in some digital compartment, I mean I had heard this before, but still the idea that this computer is holding on to my past and every original installed software and also those I have downloaded and then becoming bored with, deleted, seems to carry with it such an amazing level of computational complexity that I find myself becoming in awe of this little device which I generally speaking, take for granted.
I only had to go back two days but instead I picked a date over two weeks ago and presto, I got sound. I don't know why I picked the date I did but it was stuck in my mind for some reason and after I realized I could not access the Internet it came to me that the day I had picked was the day the guys came and hooked up my cable and for some extra change configured my wireless router for me. The restore date is actually very specific and looking at the hour I could see that I had restored to an exact moment--10:43 a.m on January 11th. This was four hours before the guys had come and hooked me up and typed some commands into this laptop which made it communicate with the router. So I reconfigured for a time that to the system would now be the future but was still actually the past. A past that had no awareness I would in a couple of days forward delete something that controlled my sound. Or, actually, maybe this was a past that did have an awareness of the future, since it was a "future" that had already happened.
I'm telling you, when this worked it made me feel in touch with something extra-normal and made me feel close to an idea that is way bigger than I, like that something you might feel in nature, or in church, or under the influence of a psychotropic agent. I was in a sense, if only two dimensionally, time traveling. So yeah, time traveling, that's what I did this week. And some of it was good.
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Not To Mention XY-Wing
It is 15 degrees this morning but feels like 8. I am just going to take the computer's word for it. Aren't I curious about what 8 feels like? No I'm not. I have taken up Sudoku and all my curiosity is now used considering the candidates 1 thru 9, times 81. Ok, less than 81. A Sudoku puzzle with 81 blank cells. That would be a very hard one. I am working on one now with 55 blank cells and it is pretty hard. It is safe to say that I have perfected the technique of recognizing single candidates and hidden single candidates but am not as comfortable with recognizing at a glance locked candidates or naked pairs, triples or quads and am a long long way from attempting any X-Wing or Swordfish maneuvers, although am cautiously and optimistically looking forward to the day when I can in the context of any type of maneuver use those terms.
It is 15 degrees this morning but feels like 8. I am just going to take the computer's word for it. Aren't I curious about what 8 feels like? No I'm not. I have taken up Sudoku and all my curiosity is now used considering the candidates 1 thru 9, times 81. Ok, less than 81. A Sudoku puzzle with 81 blank cells. That would be a very hard one. I am working on one now with 55 blank cells and it is pretty hard. It is safe to say that I have perfected the technique of recognizing single candidates and hidden single candidates but am not as comfortable with recognizing at a glance locked candidates or naked pairs, triples or quads and am a long long way from attempting any X-Wing or Swordfish maneuvers, although am cautiously and optimistically looking forward to the day when I can in the context of any type of maneuver use those terms.