Every few hours at unpredictable intervals my computer crashes.
It’s nerve-wracking.
All of a sudden, one by one, within less than three seconds, the applications shut down, email Facebook, Google Maps – whatever I have open on the Internet… And then all the others, Word, Excel and so on.
Goodbye work! Goodbye favorite poems I have saved as Word documents and was just rereading! Goodbye all Word documents I have open!
One by one they say goodbye to me, some never returning, even after the heroic retrieval attempt the system then makes.
It’s like seeing the process of your own dying, only sped up. You were talking – just a second ago you were saying something interesting, or putting a commitment on your Google calendar and then – poof – all goes quiet.
When real death happens, where will I be? It makes you wonder.
I was reflecting on the beauty of the ocean which was right in front of me as I wrote.
Also labeling more of the pictures taken at our family wedding.
And editing newer pictures with Google’s Picasa.
Working on the ABC Fall Newsletter which we hope to get out in three weeks.
And throwing some brightly colored threads of words down for a college recommendation I’ll soon be writing.
Because I’m also childish and distractable I was also looking at the lineup of new shows as presented by yesterday’s New York Times.
At the last system crash I was watching this short clip about the new show Animal Practice, debuting tonight. Hard to think that the last thing I might ever have done on this little laptop was watch the following. (On the other hand though, you gotta love a monkey. 
Get a Mac.
Do you know W.S. Merwin’s book The Shadow Of Sirius? For some perhaps obscure reasons what you wrote reminds me of a poem called “One of the Butterflies” -
The trouble with pleasure is the timing
it can overtake me without warning
and be gone before I know it is here
it can stand facing me unrecognized
while I am remembering somewhere else
in another age or someone not seen
for years and never to be seen again
in this world and it seems that I cherish
only now a joy I was not aware of
when it was here although it remains
out of reach and will not be caught or named
or called back and if I could make it stay
as I want to it would turn into pain
Get an iPad! My husband who hates Apple stuff loves the fact that since I got it (in April) he has not had to come help me fix anything on it. I used to call on him often for all the computer help he had to give me with my old PC.
Hmmmm food for thought . Morgan I haven’t written back to you since you had your high school reunion . Life is getting too complicated !
Bill Gates got a Mac years ago; he’s not Mircosoft in the head! Nice post.
In the words of Edna St. Vincent Millay,
“I shall die, but
that is all that I shall do for Death.”
Get a Mac. Really. And an external hard drive for Time Machine backups.
With all respect to Morgan, iPads are great for content consumption, but not content creation. It can be done, but creating content is much nicer on a keyboard with the ability to multitask.
I love your sensibility Bill. How could I not know this quote??
Bill is right…was basically saying that my Apple product (iPad) seems to be trouble-free! Sounds like a Mac should be in your future, Terry!