the blog quebecois

and I have bad news.

The good news is that I got a new computer for Xhriata. (I was intending to type "Christmas," but this is a new keyboard, so my fingers are getting a bit tangled up. Besides, "Xhriata" sounds like a perfectly good holiday, if somewhat paganistic.)

It came just in time. My old computer was beginning to generate some interesting (read: incomprehensible) Windows errors and I was contemplating buying an external disk drive to backup my files.

So with considerable delight I unwrapped a very nice, very powerful Hewlett-Packard computer running Vista Home Premium. At last I'll be able to play the latest version of Flight Simulator (running the demo on my old machine was like watching a slideshow).

Now for the bad news: I got a new computer. The first thing I noticed when I popped off the Quick Access Panel is that the hard drives used a completely different cabling configuration than in my old computer. I'm not sure if this is a Vista thing (I really can't see why) or, more likely, that Hewlett-Packard got a deal on some strange Chinese drives. Or that the computer industry decided to make a massive technology shift, and I didn't get the memo.

Well, whatever. The upshot is that I had some 200+ gigs of stuff on my old drives, with no convenient way of transferring it. Much of it was in the form of programs that would have had to been upgraded to Vista-compliant versions. No point in moving those; but there were thousands of music files, photos, etc., that I am rather fond of and would have to transfer eventually, most likely by setting up a network or with a null-modem transfer cable.

The things I really needed -- bookmarks, certain specialized programs and the like -- would fit comfortably on a single CD, so I set about burning that. Then the CD writer died, and the CD itself was unreadable. I was starting to believe in The Curse Of Xhriata.

Then I had one of those d'oh! moments familiar to anyone who's worked with computers. I was absently-mindedly thumbing through some advertising flyers when I came across one from a local electronics chain, offering its post-Xmas sales. Hi-def TVs, games, iPods, Flash USB drives, Nintendo acc-- wait, what?

Though both computers had slots for them, using USB memory sticks to transfer data never even crossed my mind, likely because I hadn't used one before.

Far faster than CDs, and much less in expense/frustration than the other solutions I was thinking of.

So that's what's been occupying my attention for the last few days. I expect posting will be erratic while I sort out my computer and try to whip myself into some semblance of a routine.

It's good to be back; I hope to have some new stuff up shortly.