Entropy Rules

The following is edited, based on an email I sent out May 19th in some haste to friends because at the time I thought I wasn't gonna have a computer anymore.

A couple weeks ago, I lost this little pocketbook where I kept all my phone numbers & stuff. So I can't reach any of my friends by phone. That bites.

Saturday evening my home computer gave up the ghost. My troubleshooting narrowed the problem down to a catastrophic failure of either the hard drive, the motherboard, or the power supply. The thing doesn't even beep now when I turn it on. Attempts to fix it only made it worse, naturally, since I'm just so splendid when it comes to hardware issues. That was sarcasm by the way. At the moment I have a very expensive paperweight.

Due to my financial situation, I'm unable to buy the components to get back online, so I plan to look into cancelling my home DSL subscription and spending the unforseeable future without home computer access. This means it's going to become even more difficult for those of you who like to keep in touch with me to do so. Those of you who don't want to keep in touch with me, well this situation shouldn't affect you in any way. =)

At the moment, my Yahoo mail address is still functional, but I can only access it from work, which they kinda frown on at work, so it's not a very dependable way of contacting me. I probably won't be checking it every day like I used to. Also, since Yahoo & SBC recently combined efforts, I'm thinking if I cancel my DSL service I will probably lose my Yahoo email address at the same time.

This is admittedly a painful decision for me, cuz the past eight years or so I have increasingly spent my life online, by choice, and suddenly no longer being able to do that is mildly frustrating to say the least. This may change in the near future, but my economic situation does not look like it will improve, and I'm perpetually barely keeping bills paid, so a new computer immediately falls under the terrain of "luxury."

There's some good from this though. After about fifteen years of smoking about a pack a day, I have officially quit smoking as of April 13th. My reasons are far from noble. I could no longer financially afford the habit. So I have gone cold turkey in hopes of amassing $35 a week which would otherwise have gone to the blackening of my lung cavity. That's $140 a month. You'd think I'd be able to afford stuff now, but at present I'm just barely breaking even, which I wasn't doing at all before April 13th.

The original impetus of the email in question was to let friends know how to reach me offline, since they would no longer be able to do so online, or so I had thought at the time. It wasn't intended to be an attempt to beg someone to give me a computer. I was accepting fate, and thinking maybe a break from the Internet would be a good thing. Sorta kinda 'Fox and the Grapes' like. However, many friends responded favorably, which makes it nice to have friends. I'm thankful for all of them. Fortunately, a dear friend of mine has come through, in a pinch, and allowed me to borrow her laptop until I can save up enough money to get a desktop computer again. This was, in part, provided I write up an updated entry describing the event for posterity.

Hey, it's nice to have at least one fan. =)