Why blog?

I've decided that rather than maintaining a journal in MS Word, I will take the time each day instead to blog online. Several factors influenced this decision, the main one being the tragedy (YES, tragedy) that occurred a couple days ago.

I use a Dell laptop, not having realized how inept Dell is at making a decent laptop at the time of purchase. One day, after surfing the net for an hour or so, my laptop (henceforth known as Ole Reliable) shut down on it's own and would not restart. It would just freeze up at the part where the little "loading bar"thing was supposed to show your boot progress and go no further.

I spent a good hour on the phone with a very patient fellow from Dell's tech support division before the issue was fully related and a solution could be figured out. I say the man was patient because he tolerated my inability to understand 85% of his portion of the conversation due to the heavy Indian accent and his incredibly fast tongue. WHY can't Dell hire people with easy-to-understand voices, who talk at a reasonable speed? In addition to the accent issue, Jaymes was bellowing at me in the background.

Once the problem was understood, we began a series of diagnostic tests that he walked me through. Took about 40 minutes, then I was informed that the only way to make Ole Reliable work again would be to wipe the harddrive. Needless to say, I chose to have a working POS dell laptop rather than a dead POS Dell laptop with all my files on it. Computer worked wonderfully after it was wiped, although during the process of removing the harddrive manually to check it's security, I lost one of those teeeeeeeeeeeny screws under the fridge. Doesn't seem to effect anything, so I guess it's not the end of the world.

Having wiped my harddrive, I lost everything that wasn't on the computer when I bought it. Firefox, Itunes, Limewire, AIM.... And more importantly, my 13 pages of journal in teeeeeeeeeeeny tiny 8 point font written in MS Word. Weeks worth of work on the non-fiction book on living with Autism that I probably wouldn't ever have done anything with. Ever publishing it wasn't a big deal. It was having it, being able to reread it and enjoy it. Poof. Gone. Bye-bye. -Sniffle-

So yes, tragedy struck, and now I don't trust my POS Dell Laptop, ironically known as Ole Reliable.