rashbre central: The Diamond Age

Saturday 15 March 2008

The Diamond Age

science fiction
I can't say I've ever really enjoyed the Star Wars films although I like the ideas of future/science fiction and so forth. One of the good things about the very first film was that it portrayed space related artifacts as slightly beaten up. Much like cars in Winter, the elements had a chance to spatter grit around.

Its the same around at rashbre central, when a piece of theoretically gleaming technology has to be taken into the repair shop.

It has just happened to my little work PC, which suddenly had a collection of meltdowns. First the keyboard fatigue that somehow makes rashbre central a source of google hits for people emulating my technique to reapply loose keys. Then the buzzy fan which sounds like a hovercraft preparing for Channel crossing. Then the clicks from the special shock absorbing disk and finally the one that clinched it - the blank screen. Not Blue screen. No screen. Oh dear.

Resourcefully I just plugged in a spare monitor into the erstwhile laptop until I could find a time to drop it in for repair. It was a day I was travelling abroad and I could afford to operate from Blackberry. But then I got the phone call. It said - "when we switched your machine on, the disk failed - so we have to make you a new fresh image of your disk".

Some would go weak at the knees from such news, but I'd already backed up the entire disk, so I could laugh it off. And sure enough, they've given me a replacement machine with a new disk. Same model, same age and I've noticed the 'new image' seems to mean that a few popular office products seem to now close with mystery errors involving serious looking hexadecimal codes.

So perhaps Star Wars is right and we are closer to scruffy cyberpunk rather than gleaming sci-fi.

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