the incredulous adventures of fatfinger the inept
Last night, my laptop was clobbered by a mana potion falling from my top bookshelf at high speed. The bottle hit the space in between the ;, p, and [ keys, under which there were no vital components, as the manufacturers had left a large empty space for a DVD drive. Unfortunately, the shock was apparently still intense enough and spread out evenly enough across the keyboard to cause damage to the motherboard. The machine hung instantly. A hard reboot successfully started up Windows, but Task Manager reported 50% CPU and memory usage even when no programs were running, and a few seconds later it hung again. Second reboot hung indefinitely, but produced alarming whirring noise, confirming initial diagnosis of hardware failure. Surgery revealed no visible damage, although the processor, bus, and RAM were all not far from the impact site. Did not attempt third reboot due to concerns about corrupting the hard disk. The Vaio is officially dead.
Fortunately, I have a six-year-old desktop computer sitting in a box in my room, which I have not touched since college, and the new motherboard and graphics card I accidentally guilt-tripped my dad into getting me as an early Christmas gift. (Love it--am immensely grateful for it--but feeling somewhat guilty, as these things don't come cheap and I've done nothing to deserve it. Also feels weird being unemployed yet having a top-of-the-line graphics card and pretty damn good mobo.) Pulled off the box the desktop case had been sitting in since college. Snapped open the case.
Did not freak out until I started breaking shit trying to get my old desktop case open. Broke shit. Started freaking out.
Broke the head of my only Phillips head screwdriver trying to unscrew the hard drive from the hard drive bay, halting my progress immediately. (Must have put the screws in too tight before I packed it up two years ago--some came out easily but the rest felt like they were fucking welded in.) Damaged laptop hard drive bay in failed attempt to reassemble laptop, producing a sharp crack that better not have been the platter shattering. (Had four years of photos on that drive, including those of my college graduation. Most not on facebook. Was going to use the desktop to transfer all that data over. Not really possible now.) Went to bed with desktop towercase open and half the screws not even out, feeling like a failure.
There is no excuse for this. This isn't '90s computer hardware, which could be installed in fifty wrong ways and would short if you looked at it funny. This hardware was designed to be idiotproof. It was designed to be easy enough for a fifty-year-old aunt at Wal-Mart to put together, and this professional engineer with a B.A. in computer science, who can identify the function of half the chips on the motherboard and has a vague understanding of how they work and why they're put where they are, fatfingers it into a wreck.
No wonder I can't get a job.
It's one thing to fuck up computer hardware because you did something to the electronicky bits--desktop computer parts can be sensitive, and all it takes is one accident with a refrigerator magnet, one slip with the screwdriver, one rough bump in the moving van, to damage something beyond repair. It's another to cause failures in the more superficial parts of the hardware. Like bending a pin too far, or squashing a USB plug concave, or leaving a screw in too tight. Those problems seem so easy to fix! All the expensive, delicate stuff is in perfect working order! All you have to do is get a pair of tweezers and bend that pin back the right way, twist the plastic catch so the RAM snaps back into the cradle, or put a little more torque into your screwdriver. And yet it's never that easy.
Those, IMO, are the most frustrating hardware failures of all, and the hardest to accept when they're severe enough that you have to junk an otherwise perfectly good piece of kit. Like having to take a newly completed nuclear power plant apart because the button that injects the fuel rods is stuck.
That laptop was my life for two years, you know. It was great to be away from the computer for a while, but...there really isn't much I can do, usefully, without it. It's not a matter of technological dependence, it's a matter of vocation. You can't look for programming work--hell, good luck finding writing work--without a computer. Sure, I can do without Facebook apps or stupid flash games or even LiveJournal. But I can't write code samples without a computer. I can't send resumes, I can't know when to go to the park for volunteer projects, I can't get in touch with potential employers, I can't register for GDC (warning! a huge battle ship "volunteer registration deadline" is approaching fast!!), I can't even look for free concerts and accept invitations to my friends' parties and have any semblance of a social life at all...I guess I could, for a while at least, make some progress on "Null String" (thank God I keep regular backups of my progress on my webspace, and printed out a copy recently) but it'd be really slow doing everything by hand and I wouldn't be able to send it to any publications. I couldn't even find a hardware store to buy a new Phillips head screwdriver without calling Lisa for a Google Maps logistics check. Nearly everything I needed to get out of this shitty place in life was trapped in this little square rectangle, God knows I've tried elsewhere and had no luck, and now that rectangle was sitting inert and lifeless in front of me, a victim of my own carelessness, getting progressively more broken the more I tried to fix it.
I mean, I guess it could be worse. I could have ditched this old desktop years ago, instead of inexplicably going through great pains to transport it every time I moved. I could be clean out of money instead of on my way there in a matter of months. I could have not gotten all this new hardware from my dad recently, and be unable to afford to replace my dead laptop, and be doubly mad at myself for fucking up my old motherboard. And then I would be totally and completely fucked, by my own hand, and deservedly hating myself for it.
That this situation is one bizarre streak of luck short of being exactly the situation I am in just makes me more nervous. If I wasn't a computer person I could just throw up my hands and say, "I guess I'm just no good at computers," but if that's true then what the hell have I been doing for the past sixteen years.
I keep thinking about Benny, the high schooler I met in Washington Heights who loved computers and wanted to be a professional programmer with all his heart, yet didn't even know what a compiler was, because he lived in a neighborhood where no one had anything but donated Pentium IIs from ten years ago and he was the local computer expert. I ended up teaching him introductory C++ over AIM, and I was only able to do this because I started when I was 16 and I actually remember how to set up Borland compilers from the late '90s. (GNU snarkers: try explaining Linux to a contemporary kid who has only seen operating systems newer than Windows 95 on library computers. The software may be free but the background necessary to use it isn't. And yes, I did eventually point him in enough of the right direction to get him downloading and installing Ubuntu himself.) The kid was so dedicated and curious--he kept sending me AIM messages with these little C++ calculator programs he was so proud of, and kept asking me about config files and pipes and input/output streams. He was so desperately in need of a modern machine, and it was totally beyond his means.
We talk about computers as if they were this totally unnecessary privilege, this thing we can cast off in a dramatic gesture of Luddite anti-consumerist personal liberation (no small number of talented, aging writers have publicly entertained fantasies of doing this), and for most people I guess it's true. But if you're a professional coder--worse, if you're trying to get hired as a professional coder--it's like trying to be a seventeenth century American farmer without a horse. Even if you can afford a new one, how are you even going to get to the market to buy it? Oh hey, I could just get new parts for cheap from eB...oh.
My, how times have changed. I am just barely old enough to have lived through a time in which having a computer in your home was a new, ridiculous, absurd novelty. Now, just a couple decades later, if anyone ever asks me, "Do you really need to spend all that money on a new computer?" I am going to ask them, "I don't know. Do you really need to spend all that money on water and gas?"
Benny's in community college now. He's frustrated because they haven't even taught him up to the level that he read up himself. The guy loves coding and the art of solving problems in a way that I never could; he's the most curious and dedicated programmer I've ever met. Four years from now he should be in a polo shirt waving a laser pointer at a whiteboard in front of a dozen boxed-wine-drunk Google engineers at MIT. Instead, chances are he'll be stuck repairing printers in a Best Buy Geek Squad somewhere pinching pennies for a Stroustrup. Which is not a bad place to be...if you're in high school.
Here I am, trying to console myself over a computer I initially didn't need, and now can't live without. A metal rectangle. A fancy one, but a metal rectangle, that I had somehow invested all my hopes and dreams in like a reverse Pandora's box. One that my dad bought for me in my junior year of college, and spent far more money on than he should have, not because I needed one, but because he had money and he thought my desktop was getting old and I was in no position to complain. Fuck it, I should have given my old desktop to Benny, back when it was still almost recent. What did I need with two computers, one of them now aged to the point of impracticality and the other one now destroyed. I should be glad I had a safety net because if I had to spend a big chunk on my savings on getting an entirely new machine I'd be totally screwed, but instead I just feel kind of guilty. I used my Vaio so long and cared for it so well it took a freak accident to destroy it. And my desktop sat in a box.
It's a little shocking, even to me, that I let my new graphics card and motherboard just sit there unopened in a duffel bag since late October. I remember when I used to get so excited about getting shiny new computer hardware--like a little kid at Christmas, all tearing open the box and smelling the glossiness of the manuals, and incredulous about this amazing new plaything that was going to be a piece of my life and let me do all sorts of cool new things. There was a time when I would have installed all this new hardware the moment I got it instead of only doing it two months later because I had to. There's no excitement anymore to the shopping and the installing and the unboxing, just a vague feeling of resentment. Does this mean I'm not a geek anymore?
Anyway, one day later, I am $200 short, with a new case, DVD drive, and power supply, and a cheap but sturdy set of screwdrivers, and posting this on LJ. On my old machine, mind you. Thought I'd see if the old piece of junk was still running after being moved around from apartment to apartment after two years and butterfingered half to death with a magnetic-tipped Phillips screwdriver head. Surprisingly, despite all the superficial damage, everything is working fine, just as I left it in 2007--old desktop wallpaper, old bookmarks, Windows XP, Winamp playlist still open to an Ali Project song I was listening to on my last day of college. All the hardware is ancient (I bought this desktop almost six years ago), and might as well be fucking welded to the case because the Phillips screws have been worn from Xs into Os, but it's otherwise in good working order. It will be a good backup machine, maybe an FTP server or something to do non-programming computer stuff on, or at worst some kit to pawn off on eBay if my cash reserves run low before I find work. (Goodness knows if it comes to that I'll probably sell my newer hardware first, piece by piece.) But the new machine is coming along nicely, and it will be more powerful and open up far more opportunities (pixel shaders! DirectX 10! OpenGL test apps not running at a crawl!) than my dead Vaio ever could. It's such a stupid and absurd privilege that thanks to my dad's generosity I can build a new computer at a time when I have no job--especially since I have another one that works just fine, even if it's obsolete and a loud footstep short of falling to pieces. And yet, it beats trying to get to Carnegie Hall without as much as a violin to my name. Which is exactly what an aspiring game programmer without a computer is.
If you don't hear from me in the next few days, I am sitting on the floor of my room, having fucked up with the screwdriver yet again, and am trying to choose between drinking and having steady hands--a choice that grows ever more difficult as the night grows long.
Fortunately, I have a six-year-old desktop computer sitting in a box in my room, which I have not touched since college, and the new motherboard and graphics card I accidentally guilt-tripped my dad into getting me as an early Christmas gift. (Love it--am immensely grateful for it--but feeling somewhat guilty, as these things don't come cheap and I've done nothing to deserve it. Also feels weird being unemployed yet having a top-of-the-line graphics card and pretty damn good mobo.) Pulled off the box the desktop case had been sitting in since college. Snapped open the case.
Did not freak out until I started breaking shit trying to get my old desktop case open. Broke shit. Started freaking out.
Broke the head of my only Phillips head screwdriver trying to unscrew the hard drive from the hard drive bay, halting my progress immediately. (Must have put the screws in too tight before I packed it up two years ago--some came out easily but the rest felt like they were fucking welded in.) Damaged laptop hard drive bay in failed attempt to reassemble laptop, producing a sharp crack that better not have been the platter shattering. (Had four years of photos on that drive, including those of my college graduation. Most not on facebook. Was going to use the desktop to transfer all that data over. Not really possible now.) Went to bed with desktop towercase open and half the screws not even out, feeling like a failure.
There is no excuse for this. This isn't '90s computer hardware, which could be installed in fifty wrong ways and would short if you looked at it funny. This hardware was designed to be idiotproof. It was designed to be easy enough for a fifty-year-old aunt at Wal-Mart to put together, and this professional engineer with a B.A. in computer science, who can identify the function of half the chips on the motherboard and has a vague understanding of how they work and why they're put where they are, fatfingers it into a wreck.
No wonder I can't get a job.
It's one thing to fuck up computer hardware because you did something to the electronicky bits--desktop computer parts can be sensitive, and all it takes is one accident with a refrigerator magnet, one slip with the screwdriver, one rough bump in the moving van, to damage something beyond repair. It's another to cause failures in the more superficial parts of the hardware. Like bending a pin too far, or squashing a USB plug concave, or leaving a screw in too tight. Those problems seem so easy to fix! All the expensive, delicate stuff is in perfect working order! All you have to do is get a pair of tweezers and bend that pin back the right way, twist the plastic catch so the RAM snaps back into the cradle, or put a little more torque into your screwdriver. And yet it's never that easy.
Those, IMO, are the most frustrating hardware failures of all, and the hardest to accept when they're severe enough that you have to junk an otherwise perfectly good piece of kit. Like having to take a newly completed nuclear power plant apart because the button that injects the fuel rods is stuck.
That laptop was my life for two years, you know. It was great to be away from the computer for a while, but...there really isn't much I can do, usefully, without it. It's not a matter of technological dependence, it's a matter of vocation. You can't look for programming work--hell, good luck finding writing work--without a computer. Sure, I can do without Facebook apps or stupid flash games or even LiveJournal. But I can't write code samples without a computer. I can't send resumes, I can't know when to go to the park for volunteer projects, I can't get in touch with potential employers, I can't register for GDC (warning! a huge battle ship "volunteer registration deadline" is approaching fast!!), I can't even look for free concerts and accept invitations to my friends' parties and have any semblance of a social life at all...I guess I could, for a while at least, make some progress on "Null String" (thank God I keep regular backups of my progress on my webspace, and printed out a copy recently) but it'd be really slow doing everything by hand and I wouldn't be able to send it to any publications. I couldn't even find a hardware store to buy a new Phillips head screwdriver without calling Lisa for a Google Maps logistics check. Nearly everything I needed to get out of this shitty place in life was trapped in this little square rectangle, God knows I've tried elsewhere and had no luck, and now that rectangle was sitting inert and lifeless in front of me, a victim of my own carelessness, getting progressively more broken the more I tried to fix it.
I mean, I guess it could be worse. I could have ditched this old desktop years ago, instead of inexplicably going through great pains to transport it every time I moved. I could be clean out of money instead of on my way there in a matter of months. I could have not gotten all this new hardware from my dad recently, and be unable to afford to replace my dead laptop, and be doubly mad at myself for fucking up my old motherboard. And then I would be totally and completely fucked, by my own hand, and deservedly hating myself for it.
That this situation is one bizarre streak of luck short of being exactly the situation I am in just makes me more nervous. If I wasn't a computer person I could just throw up my hands and say, "I guess I'm just no good at computers," but if that's true then what the hell have I been doing for the past sixteen years.
I keep thinking about Benny, the high schooler I met in Washington Heights who loved computers and wanted to be a professional programmer with all his heart, yet didn't even know what a compiler was, because he lived in a neighborhood where no one had anything but donated Pentium IIs from ten years ago and he was the local computer expert. I ended up teaching him introductory C++ over AIM, and I was only able to do this because I started when I was 16 and I actually remember how to set up Borland compilers from the late '90s. (GNU snarkers: try explaining Linux to a contemporary kid who has only seen operating systems newer than Windows 95 on library computers. The software may be free but the background necessary to use it isn't. And yes, I did eventually point him in enough of the right direction to get him downloading and installing Ubuntu himself.) The kid was so dedicated and curious--he kept sending me AIM messages with these little C++ calculator programs he was so proud of, and kept asking me about config files and pipes and input/output streams. He was so desperately in need of a modern machine, and it was totally beyond his means.
We talk about computers as if they were this totally unnecessary privilege, this thing we can cast off in a dramatic gesture of Luddite anti-consumerist personal liberation (no small number of talented, aging writers have publicly entertained fantasies of doing this), and for most people I guess it's true. But if you're a professional coder--worse, if you're trying to get hired as a professional coder--it's like trying to be a seventeenth century American farmer without a horse. Even if you can afford a new one, how are you even going to get to the market to buy it? Oh hey, I could just get new parts for cheap from eB...oh.
My, how times have changed. I am just barely old enough to have lived through a time in which having a computer in your home was a new, ridiculous, absurd novelty. Now, just a couple decades later, if anyone ever asks me, "Do you really need to spend all that money on a new computer?" I am going to ask them, "I don't know. Do you really need to spend all that money on water and gas?"
Benny's in community college now. He's frustrated because they haven't even taught him up to the level that he read up himself. The guy loves coding and the art of solving problems in a way that I never could; he's the most curious and dedicated programmer I've ever met. Four years from now he should be in a polo shirt waving a laser pointer at a whiteboard in front of a dozen boxed-wine-drunk Google engineers at MIT. Instead, chances are he'll be stuck repairing printers in a Best Buy Geek Squad somewhere pinching pennies for a Stroustrup. Which is not a bad place to be...if you're in high school.
Here I am, trying to console myself over a computer I initially didn't need, and now can't live without. A metal rectangle. A fancy one, but a metal rectangle, that I had somehow invested all my hopes and dreams in like a reverse Pandora's box. One that my dad bought for me in my junior year of college, and spent far more money on than he should have, not because I needed one, but because he had money and he thought my desktop was getting old and I was in no position to complain. Fuck it, I should have given my old desktop to Benny, back when it was still almost recent. What did I need with two computers, one of them now aged to the point of impracticality and the other one now destroyed. I should be glad I had a safety net because if I had to spend a big chunk on my savings on getting an entirely new machine I'd be totally screwed, but instead I just feel kind of guilty. I used my Vaio so long and cared for it so well it took a freak accident to destroy it. And my desktop sat in a box.
It's a little shocking, even to me, that I let my new graphics card and motherboard just sit there unopened in a duffel bag since late October. I remember when I used to get so excited about getting shiny new computer hardware--like a little kid at Christmas, all tearing open the box and smelling the glossiness of the manuals, and incredulous about this amazing new plaything that was going to be a piece of my life and let me do all sorts of cool new things. There was a time when I would have installed all this new hardware the moment I got it instead of only doing it two months later because I had to. There's no excitement anymore to the shopping and the installing and the unboxing, just a vague feeling of resentment. Does this mean I'm not a geek anymore?
Anyway, one day later, I am $200 short, with a new case, DVD drive, and power supply, and a cheap but sturdy set of screwdrivers, and posting this on LJ. On my old machine, mind you. Thought I'd see if the old piece of junk was still running after being moved around from apartment to apartment after two years and butterfingered half to death with a magnetic-tipped Phillips screwdriver head. Surprisingly, despite all the superficial damage, everything is working fine, just as I left it in 2007--old desktop wallpaper, old bookmarks, Windows XP, Winamp playlist still open to an Ali Project song I was listening to on my last day of college. All the hardware is ancient (I bought this desktop almost six years ago), and might as well be fucking welded to the case because the Phillips screws have been worn from Xs into Os, but it's otherwise in good working order. It will be a good backup machine, maybe an FTP server or something to do non-programming computer stuff on, or at worst some kit to pawn off on eBay if my cash reserves run low before I find work. (Goodness knows if it comes to that I'll probably sell my newer hardware first, piece by piece.) But the new machine is coming along nicely, and it will be more powerful and open up far more opportunities (pixel shaders! DirectX 10! OpenGL test apps not running at a crawl!) than my dead Vaio ever could. It's such a stupid and absurd privilege that thanks to my dad's generosity I can build a new computer at a time when I have no job--especially since I have another one that works just fine, even if it's obsolete and a loud footstep short of falling to pieces. And yet, it beats trying to get to Carnegie Hall without as much as a violin to my name. Which is exactly what an aspiring game programmer without a computer is.
If you don't hear from me in the next few days, I am sitting on the floor of my room, having fucked up with the screwdriver yet again, and am trying to choose between drinking and having steady hands--a choice that grows ever more difficult as the night grows long.