Tag Archives: computer failure

Breakfast with the Blue Screen of Death

December 12, 2015 By in Mundane Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Blue Screen of Death!

Anne and I went out for our usual Saturday breakfast today and were greeted with a fun reminder of how much the restaurant business has changed since ye olden tymes. The young crew members who provided us with grade-A coffee and service explained the error happened the night before and…well, here it still was. Oops!

I can vouch for the fact that restaurant tech support, even for major corporate chains, isn’t always a 24-hour service. Back in the day, though, we didn’t need it to keep our menus from crashing.

Right this way for another quick memory of The Way Things Used to Be…

Eulogy for Sixteen Years’ Worth of Files

July 6, 2015 By in Meta Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Black Screen!

Thank you all for coming. I’ve gathered my wits today to say a few words about the losses my wife and I suffered in the Great Hard Drive Crash of July 1, 2015.

We’ve had the same PC since at least 2009, maybe even longer. It was neither top-of-the-line Alienware nor an eMachines glorified calculator when I bonded with it at Fry’s Electronics and brought it home to join our household. I spent more than I could afford at the time, but it served us well in the long run and more than made up the difference to us on a number of levels. It was terrible for gaming and I let that dream go early, but it served all our modest needs with an efficiency and speed that its predecessors could never touch. We were one big happy family.

Meanwhile behind the scenes, things were falling apart…