I am typing to you from my new PC! I've been using it for a few days now, bit by bit discovering the things I don't have that I need. My other PC is sitting on the other side of my desk, all set up and ready to fire up each time I find something else I need to grab off of it. I was going to make a Behind The Dumb (really!) of "Let's put it together!", but it was such a massive task to build, I just couldn't bring myself to do it.
It's... difficult. Big time. Not the computer itself, that is great. The most amazing computer I've ever had, while simultaneously one of the cheapest. I'm running WoW at max settings, and seeing 100-200FPS. A lot nicer than 13FPS at low settings. It's a little dizzying to look at, actually, and I think it might be giving me motion sickness. But it's pretty! And oh the instant load times! I'm pretty sure even my internet's faster, but I can't figure out how that could be possible.
But! The thing that is making it difficult is this whole idea of operating my life through a new lens. My whole life is on the computer (you call it sad, I call it The Future!!), and all the little things are just off. Passwords that I used to have stored and now have to dig up and re-type, websites that aren't in my history, programs I don't have installed, programs I can't find anymore or don't know
how to install again, the obnoxious things Windows 7 does to "help" you, drivers for the hardware, settings for connecting to IRC, fonts I'm missing. All of these things just put my life off-kilter and leave me just feeling uncomfortable, strange as that may seem. I can't just roll through life and deal with the things that happen as usual, because suddenly the crystal lens I used to view life ("life" is my peoples' word for the internet) is cloudy and fractured, so it's no longer transparent to me. I have to fiddle with it.
That'll all fade away in time, as this new home of mine becomes the norm, but boy, for now I'm just all in a tizzy. And I have so many major things going on in reality/business, that it's just all a little overwhelming. Makes me want to take a break, but if I do that, it all just piles up higher. I just need to get a few little things done, then the pile will seem less extreme.
(Side adventure for the hopelessly dull: I can't find my Quicken CD, but even if I could, Quicken has been warning me that since I use the 2009 edition, it's going to stop doing online statement downloads as of April, so I need to upgrade. Well, that's fine and dandy and money-grubbing, but the problem is, when I went to shop for Quicken 2012, I discover that it's HORRIBLE. It has mostly 1-star reviews on Amazon, from people complaining about all the bugs and how it won't actually download statements for most people. So now I'm giving MoneyDance a try. And like the computer, it does
almost all the same things Quicken did, but it does them differently and a little more awkwardly. I don't know if I can adjust, or if I'll just cross my fingers and hope that 2012 works for me. Scary world. Just as my computer is my life, Quicken is my entire financial world)
