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fiddling and breaking stuff
I am a compulsive fiddler. I keep tweaking my operating system to get it more and more how I want it. No matter how much I do so I never seem to be satisfied for more than a day or two. When I stop fiddling with settings and icons and scripts it is not that I am completely happy so much as feeling that I should be getting actual constructive work done.
This compulsion to fiddle has a good side and a bad side.
The good side is that it constantly takes me on long journeys deep into dark mysteries inside the machine and always teaches me enormous amounts. I love to learn so that suits me very nicely and the adventures are mostly fun.
The bad side is that I break things. It doesn't happen very often, and I've taught myself so much with this approach that it usually doesn't take me long to fix it, but occasionally things go terribly, spectacularly wrong. As it did today. I was making some tiny alteration, so insignificant that I can't remember what it was or why I even wanted to do it. I do thousands of these little things all the time, but this time all my movie and sound player programs suddenly ceased to function. What's worse, is that when I tried to fix the problem, guided by rather uninformative error messages, I made my operating system completely unbootable! The sweat would have broken out on an other person's forehead, but I just growled and rebooted into one of the other operating systems on my machine. I normally have at least 3 operating systems on the one machine that I can choose to boot up with, just for these sorts of situations. After doing what I could to try and fix it from there I decided instead to upgrade this version of Puppy, which is something I'd been wanting to find a reason to do anyway. This would reinstall all the system files and hopefully fix the problem.
One of the nice things about recent versions of Puppy is that upgrading between minor versions like this is a breeze. A few minutes later it was done. Unfortunately it only fixed part of the problem. Sound programs work, but I couldn't get mplayer to run. I have 2 versions of it installed on my machine and neither of them would work, which made me think a system file was faulty, however they'd all been fixed (I hoped). I tried installing a slightly older version of mplayer, and now suddenly both versions of mplayer work! Yay!
This little adventure took me all day, from about 9am to about 2am. Yeesh!
But I learned a lot. :)
Unfortunately it won't stop me fiddling.
This compulsion to fiddle has a good side and a bad side.
The good side is that it constantly takes me on long journeys deep into dark mysteries inside the machine and always teaches me enormous amounts. I love to learn so that suits me very nicely and the adventures are mostly fun.
The bad side is that I break things. It doesn't happen very often, and I've taught myself so much with this approach that it usually doesn't take me long to fix it, but occasionally things go terribly, spectacularly wrong. As it did today. I was making some tiny alteration, so insignificant that I can't remember what it was or why I even wanted to do it. I do thousands of these little things all the time, but this time all my movie and sound player programs suddenly ceased to function. What's worse, is that when I tried to fix the problem, guided by rather uninformative error messages, I made my operating system completely unbootable! The sweat would have broken out on an other person's forehead, but I just growled and rebooted into one of the other operating systems on my machine. I normally have at least 3 operating systems on the one machine that I can choose to boot up with, just for these sorts of situations. After doing what I could to try and fix it from there I decided instead to upgrade this version of Puppy, which is something I'd been wanting to find a reason to do anyway. This would reinstall all the system files and hopefully fix the problem.
One of the nice things about recent versions of Puppy is that upgrading between minor versions like this is a breeze. A few minutes later it was done. Unfortunately it only fixed part of the problem. Sound programs work, but I couldn't get mplayer to run. I have 2 versions of it installed on my machine and neither of them would work, which made me think a system file was faulty, however they'd all been fixed (I hoped). I tried installing a slightly older version of mplayer, and now suddenly both versions of mplayer work! Yay!
This little adventure took me all day, from about 9am to about 2am. Yeesh!
But I learned a lot. :)
Unfortunately it won't stop me fiddling.