Feeling much better now.

So I had to go to Vinita to work on Mom's computer.  Needless to say, when her computer breaks down anywhere from Jan 1st to April 16th, it's a major deal.  On my way down there I was listening to The Best Of R.E.M.  There is a song on there called Everybody Hurts and it was written after a friend of theirs commited suicide.  This reminded me of a friend in college that also decided to "check-out early" with the assistance of a shotgun and then that reminded me of a scene from Red Dwarf.  Rimmer had apparently manned phones at a anti-suicide hot-line.  6 people commited suicide that day and one of them had only accidentally dialed a wrong number (he was trying to get the Cricket scores).  So I'm driving to Vinita cackling  (about suicide of all things) most of the way down.  Rimmer reminds me a lot of myself.  Obnoxious, loud mouthed, moron, and above all, a smeghead.  But he just accepts the fact that he is that way and no matter how he tries to change it, it is just part of him.  I'm feeling better now.

Tech tip:

The motherboard went out on mom's computer.  No time to order a motherboard so we went off to buy a new computer.  Should be as simple as plugging the old hard-drive as a slave drive to in the new computer and copying the data in.  Right?  Wrong!  Apparently she was running some software called Norton GoBack.  The programmers decided that it was cool to funkify the Master Boot Record.  Why did they do this?  Because they are evil.  Vista wouldn't recognize the drive.  I had to boot into Safe mode on an old computer and copy the data to flash drives (at about 1/8" speed and this is not an exaggeration because in safe mode, USB drives apparently go back to the USB 1.1 standard instead of the 2.0 standard?  Why?  They are evil too).  So it took about 4 hours to copy the data to the drives and about 20 minutes to copy it off the drives.  We started about noon and finished everything at midnight.  Needless to say, I'm not happy with Norton GoBack (or Norton).  It right up there with the most evil software imaginable (I'm looking at you Weatherbug).

nc