Things that stress me out.
Jul. 22nd, 2007 11:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerI've finished Harry Potter, and lack anyone to talk to it about so I thought I'd see if I could link up Dad's laptop to my phone over bluetooth and then use that to get to LJ and see what everyone else was saying about it.
45 minutes of playing later I came to the conclusion that his laptop doesn't actually have a bluetooth dongle in it. It took me that long because I've never used Vista before and never tried to set up bluetooth before, so I couldn't tell if I was just missing some setting.
Having given up on that I decided that installing his Father's Day present (Company of Heroes) would be fun - I've not seen it, but I'd heard good things about it. I got as far as the first of the install screens and it asked for the serial number. Checking the back of the manual I discovered that the serial number space was entirely blank.
Which just left me feeling tense, stressed and on edge, which I know are three different descriptions of the same thing but I want to be sure I'm getting my feelings across here...
I hate things not working. I'm sure that a lot of my computer skills stem from my experiences as a teenager, when I'd break something and then be totally focussed on fixing it for the next hour (or two, or eight) until I'd got it working again and the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach had gone away.
It all ties back in with my love for order, reason and organisation. With wanting to understand why things are the way they are and exert some control over them. I want the world to work the way I expect it to. And when it doesn't I want to be able to understand either what I did wrong, or where my understanding is lacking.
None of this is as bad as it was. Nowadays I have the world firmly (if fuzzily) divided into things that can be argued and things that can't, as well as into things that I've heard the arguments over 500 times, and things where I might hear a new argument. I no longer feel the need to understand (and thus feel a measure of control over) everything. And by and large I feel much happier because of this.
All of which notwithstanding I'm not going to be happy until I've got the damned game installed and working.
45 minutes of playing later I came to the conclusion that his laptop doesn't actually have a bluetooth dongle in it. It took me that long because I've never used Vista before and never tried to set up bluetooth before, so I couldn't tell if I was just missing some setting.
Having given up on that I decided that installing his Father's Day present (Company of Heroes) would be fun - I've not seen it, but I'd heard good things about it. I got as far as the first of the install screens and it asked for the serial number. Checking the back of the manual I discovered that the serial number space was entirely blank.
Which just left me feeling tense, stressed and on edge, which I know are three different descriptions of the same thing but I want to be sure I'm getting my feelings across here...
I hate things not working. I'm sure that a lot of my computer skills stem from my experiences as a teenager, when I'd break something and then be totally focussed on fixing it for the next hour (or two, or eight) until I'd got it working again and the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach had gone away.
It all ties back in with my love for order, reason and organisation. With wanting to understand why things are the way they are and exert some control over them. I want the world to work the way I expect it to. And when it doesn't I want to be able to understand either what I did wrong, or where my understanding is lacking.
None of this is as bad as it was. Nowadays I have the world firmly (if fuzzily) divided into things that can be argued and things that can't, as well as into things that I've heard the arguments over 500 times, and things where I might hear a new argument. I no longer feel the need to understand (and thus feel a measure of control over) everything. And by and large I feel much happier because of this.
All of which notwithstanding I'm not going to be happy until I've got the damned game installed and working.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-24 12:35 am (UTC)that, less than 5 hours after "For the next week the internet will be write only :-)"
You sure didn't last long. And you even had a smiley there, as if you truly were looking forward to being cut off from civilization.
At work, we can generally type in all 1's for the serial #s when installing things. Not sure if those are special corporate versions, or how come it works.