A brief break from the insanity

Ed's PC has been problematic, and has gone through four power supplies. On taking it down to the PC shop this time they diagnosed a motherboard fault and charged him £90 to change it out for a new one.

They then wanted to reinstall Windows and charge him £30 for the pleasure of doing so (and making him a back-up of his files). Except that (a) I didn't see why we couldn't just do a repair of Windows to force it to recognise the new motherboard and (b)they didn't seem to be able to find his files on the drive. So I said I'd do it for him.

Booting from a CD with NTFS4DOS on it has shown me his files are just fine, and that the person who failed to copy them off was just incompetent. So if I can just find my XP install disk this will all be sorted fairly quickly.

Except the bastard's gone missing. Which is especially annoying as I spent 4 hours looking for it the other day when I reinstalled Windows on _my_ machine. And I've found all the other disks I bumped into then, but not this one.

Back into the fray I go...

Edit: Found it 3 minutes later

Meme tag

Tagged by lee_lou2 and waiting for files to backup on Ed's machine, here's a huuuuuge meme.

1. Bold the ones that are true about you
2. Italicise the ones you wish were true about you
3. Add something to the list that is true about you
4. Tag some people if you feel inclined to do so!

* I miss somebody right now.
* I don't watch much TV these days.
* I own lots of books.
* I wear glasses or contact lenses.
* I love to play video games.
* I've tried marijuana.
* I've watched porn movies.
* I have been the psycho-ex in a past relationship.
( Because there's a lot of it... )

Neophilia is addictive

Two recent articles on learning and newness have caught my attention. Here is a piece linking neophilia (liking newness) to monoamine oxidase (which already has links to serotonin and the like), while this article talks about how the "click" of comprehension we have when we understand something is associated with the release of opiates.

And there's something there that's reminiscient of the craving I have for finding new things and fitting them into my existing patterns on thought, looking for the next new thing to give me that feeling of sudden understanding. And why I get sucked into things just one step beyond what I understand, crawling around the edges of my jigsaw, looking for the next piece that fits - never going so far that I have pieces that I can't fit in, but never happy with things I already know.