It is easier to ask forgiveness than permission . . .

Today's posting forecast: Partly sunny, with a small chance of bit-bursts.

The good news is, I have all the software pre-loaded onto my new computer. Tonight I plan to throw the wireless card and my old hard drive in it so I can get myself online and do additional installations and file transfers at my leisure.

The bad news is, my dad called me up last night because he couldn't get something to print. He handed the phone over to my mom, and it turns out that what they couldn't print was his boarding pass for the flight he's taking today.

His computer runs Windows ME, and like mine, dates to that brief period where you could purchase a computer with the OS installed and the .cab files available, but which would come without reinstallation media. The understanding was that if you had to reformat, you'd have to send the box back to the point of purchase, since they owned the media. So the thing is corrupt as hell and has all kinds of problems. But, because he can't fix them and hands the task over to me or Mom, he still feels that it runs fine. The fact that we've had to do in-place re-installs of the Windoze three times in the last six months doesn't register as "not fine," in his book.

He's given lip service to the fact that he needs to get a new computer, if only because I've reported that it's getting to the point where I can no longer support it--I can try, but some day something will crash that I won't be able to fix. In practice, he checks the ads in the paper every week, has me tell him if any of them are a good deal, and then never actually goes down to see about buying a new box.

Last night, the print spooler had locked up without crashing entirely. It had made the whole OS go unstable. If I'd been able to kill individual processes and re-start the service, I could probably have resuscitated it long enough to print the boarding pass before having Mom cold boot the machine. But that kind of process-level control isn't available in Windows ME, and I don't think the access to individual services is, either--at least, I couldn't find it in the fifteen minutes I devoted to the project.

I'm still waiting to find out if they were able to get back to the check-in page after cold booting and print, or if they had to go in extra-early to the airport today to get the resulting screw-up sorted out.

At some point, while I was researching services under Windows ME, my mom said, "I think you and I have a date this weekend."

I asked, "Are we buying Dad's new computer?"

She said, "Yup. He's gone till Sunday night--we can get everything set up on the new computer and have it in place before he gets back." So between mine and Dad's (which is a worse mess) I will be up to my eyeballs in geekdom this weekend, and posts will be brief and tired, if I get to make them at all.

I'm not sure Mom bothered to tell him, first. After all, if we told him, he might say no.