I received an e-mail today saying, "Where'd your site go?" This happened once before, for the same reason:

The front page of this site shows the last two weeks or so of entries. I haven't posted anything since, oh, February 12th, so that means that none of my essays are up on the front page anymore.

Until now. :-)

This past week and a half has been a bad one for me and technology. The two biggest issues have been 1) my computer and 2) my car. My computer went senile. After four years, it experienced the onset of dementia and couldn't remember anything. It kept shutting down for no reason. Like a Florida pensioner whose driver's license should have been revoked years ago, it kept crashing. I made the sad decision to fire the old computer, but hiring the replacement took some time. In the meantime, there was much woe to be had. And no time to post here, I'm afraid.

In the meantime, I took my car in to have the "coil pack" replaced. A coil pack, I'm told, does the job that a distributor cap used to do. Costs about $600 to replace, too. Well, $400, but then the shop finds out there's problems with the wires, and the spark plugs need to be replaced, etc., etc.

Except, when I got the thing home, the check engine light came on again and it was running rough and, oh yeah, something was burning in the engine compartment. Took it back to the shop. Later that day, I had it back. They said the computer reported that it was two of the (brand new) spark plugs. Two days later, same symptoms. Took it back. This time, they said it must have been a bad coil pack that was causing the problems both times. (And, no, the shop didn't charge me for the last two visits. They are expensive, but they stand by their work. I like them.)

The net result was that, as with the computer, I spent a great deal of time either without the car or attending to the car, and little time actually using the car. Unlike the computer, though, my car didn't keep crashing. That's good.

As I told Paulette when I drove home from the shop the third time, "Feels like driving a new car. Again."

And as for the replacement computer, well... there are some nice things about having a new machine. Since Paulette and I run a combo Mac/PC shop, and it was my Mac that died, the new machine is a Mac that runs OS X. As with Windows XP -- the first Windows operating system that has surprised me in a *pleasant* way -- OS X is the first Mac OS in a long time that I've enjoyed using. It's much more reliable than the OS 9's or the late 8's were, and it has a bunch of nice little touches that have made my computing experience just... pleasant. XP and OS X are, in a word, "nice." Not a word I like to use, but preferable to the words I used to use to describe my work-environment operating systems.

So, yeah, this past week or two have been pretty bad for me technology-wise, but now it looks like smooth driving ahead. For at least a little while. :-)