Today from past midnight til about 3 a.m. and continuing into today I frittered away the precious commodity called time, by fucking around with a message board that was throwing out unsolvable riddles.

It’s probably laudable somehow, or possibly just pathetic and sad, that I am trying to teach myself some stuff about websites, PHP, MySQL and all sorts of open source toys. Further, that a bulletin board community, which is currently numbered at one member, is my chosen learning lab is beyond pathetic, actually teetering on the border of loserland. I am reminded of Weiner-dog’s Special People Club in Welcome to the Dollhouse.

In the end, no amount of reading through forums finding similar errors and rebuilding tables and truncating and concatenating and tweaking and editing did any good. I trashed the sad little place and started clean.

Actually, I do hope to build something over time. What it will be is not a solid state plan, but I have hope at the moment.

The counterpoint or counterpunch to all of this uber-geek time wasting was my arrival at work. Upon repeated attempts, hitting F10s and F8s and F3s and resetting startup junk, even checking all cables and power no booting could be had on my desktop when I got to work this morning. All I had was a blank, black screen and some white text with an error message I did not recognize. Finally, in defeat I called the Help Desk. Since I’m first tier support for 25 or so poor wretches, I seldom call the Help Desk, especially for clearly desktop-related problems. Within minutes of arrival, a kind young intern fixed me right up. He popped the non-bootable disk out of my A: drive. The floppy wasn’t even mine; I don’t use floppies. I had formatted it for someone else.

The young man was kind. He even shook my hand as he left, assuring me he had seen worse.