Five Questions

Darren over at speakeasy has thrown the Five Questions meme at me. I'm to answer these - but hey, I asked for it, so...

1) How has life changed, now that you're a Dad?
I'm more cautious. I drive more carefully. I'm more aware of health issues, and I'm definitely more aware of my surroundings. With a 3-year-old, you need to know what's going on. Life has changed in many ways, but the biggest is - there's someone who depends on us completely and totally. Very sobering, that.

2) What is your experience commuting to Edmonton from Calgary?
It sucks. Really.

3) Superpowers. What superpowers do you currently possess? What superpowers would you like?

I have the ability to become completely invisible. Not literally, but certainly effectively. I always wanted to have Superman's x-ray vision. That would be cool.

4) Tell me a humourous anecdote about working with computers.
What's a computer? No, wait. Uhhh... once, I wanted to cross a bridge, and this evil troll jumped out and - oh, wait. Wrong story.

I once had to diagnose a PC that wouldn't read floppies properly. In DOS¹, if you typed DIR, you'd get gobbledygook. If you tried to run a program you knew was on the floppy, it would fail. But if you typed in the program name (and extension) as it appeared in the DIR listing, it would run! For example, DEMO.EXE would show up as H@E$.@T@ and if you typed in H@E$.@T@ and hit enter, it would run.

I checked everything I could think of. I checked the connector cable to the drive, the power connector, I even *swapped* the drive out and tried another. Same thing. Tried Viruscan. Nothing worked.

Just when I was about to give up, I noticed something that didn't look right at the back of the computer. One of the motherboard power connectors was not completely pushed down on one side. I clicked it home, and powered up, typed DIR and voila! fixed!

5) What advice do you want to pass down to the next generation?
Use Sunscreen. Trust me. Oh, and there's that thing about not taking life too seriously, but don't be a jackass, either. Sober thought can be a good thing.

¹DOS: the original source of Bill's wealth. An Operating System, for you young'uns that never had the pleasure of using it...
²ok, it may not have been humorous, but...

The rules: if you want me to ask you five questions, ask me in the comments below. I will give you the questions in a subsequent entry.

Posted by Squiddy at August 20, 2003 09:21 PM | TrackBack