Chain Smoking Blue Monkey

When do I stop doing this?

Starting is easy. Stopping is not. Starting an addiction is as easy as having a bad day and needing something to help forget it. The new thing. The thing to make life easier. After all, there’s a need for that new thing. Something to forget that lousy day? Something to make life easier? There are times, in fact, that something new and novel is necessary.

The old stuff isn’t working anymore. The rolodex is stained beyond legibility. The day calendar is covered in beer, coffee, whiskey and cigarette stains. Some of the months are analogous to your memory in that they are missing. Torn out. Tossed aside in a fit of frustrated inability to write down what should have happened instead of what did happen. Or worse… writing down appointments you actually did keep as opposed to the ones that you planned to keep, and they all had to do with putting out that fire your friend started and then cleaning up the aftermath instead of building that dream cottage on the beach with a place for a fridge full of beer and margaritas.

The journal is a wire bound high school ruled notebook written in with number 2 pencil, a pen found on the sidewalk, and sometimes something that may or may not be blood (but for certain isn’t graphite or ink). This is where the best thoughts of the day end up? In the same place some kid is dashing out heartfelt poems and doodling bleeding hearts?

This stuff is a MESS! Piles of stained paper. Paper. Good technology. Tried and true. Textural in nature. Smells. Feels. Cam be held. Exist. Good stuff. Messy stuff. It’s a MESS! Needs a place to BE. Needs a place to stay. Needs physical space. Collects dust. Oh paper, how much love there is for you, yet how much hate.

Paper isn’t going to end here, though. Paper is just going to start being a part of something new. Something more. Something with more demanding needs, but something with a mighty high payoff. Paper and the computer are going to be pals. Like the good old days. Like the 80s when paper held computer’s hand and led computer into a strange, scary forest of new creatures and new people. New people that liked computer A LOT. A little too much. People that liked to hang out with computer so much that paper wondered how those years passed so quick and so many drunken nights happened until one morning paper woke up alone ten years behind computer with no retirement plan. Paper got dumped.

This story isn’t about paper, though. This story is about how, exactly, to make a decision. How to decide on when it’s finally time to start looking for that technology to solve that problem. This Palm Pilot was good enough then. Why isn’t it good enough now? This Blue iMac was good enough then. Why isn’t it good enough now? All manner of things once were good enough and mysteriously, now, they aren’t. The Palm Pilot evokes wide eyes and provokes the same reaction as a slide rule or abacus. The Blue iMac is remembered in a “I had one of those!” moments. But… but… but… it all still works! What’s happening? Why can’t it still work?

Because it all moves as fast as what it moves. And it moves data. Data moves fast now. Very, very fast. Accelerating along with the unstoppable tide of time and human desire. SCORCHING ahead. Burning. Causing the hand to pull back in pain. The head spins dizzily and this thing start to feel heavy and slow. And worse. It feels worse. It won’t stay on long. It’s big. It’s got that… color. It’s beige. Or gray. Or blue. But is that a reason to just toss it aside? Oh yes, yes, yes it is. It isn’t the only reason. It isn’t keeping up. With thinking. With viewing. With adapting. Those other things that aren’t so set in stone, they are.

What is next? There has to be something next. The next thing to try that works. That, for a little while, will serve a purpose. No! Serve THE purpose! The purpose to keep up with it all. The purpose to profit. The purpose to take those damn ideas and keep them. NO! Not keep them. Cultivate them. Make them grow. Make them into things that themselves have purpose.

What is here isn’t working. The deck needs shuffled. A new card has to be pulled from the deck.

Next time, I’m going to pull a new card from the deck.

In the day to day “Have you restarted it?” life of a CSBmonkey, there are a few constants, and one of those is the inevitable crashing of these application thingies.  They crash like drunken teenagers on prom night heading home at 5 am in mom’s mini van.  Often, the results are the same.  Split skulls from the impact, brains hanging out and spread across the pavement.  The anguish and the misery that follows a crash is inevitable.  That was important stuff involved in the crash… the graduating high school student and the yearly budget someone forgot to ctrl-s after working on it for 12 hours.  The prom night crash is obvious, though.  Booze.  A little toke after that.  Some grinding and slurping late into the night (what teenager isn’t going to stay awake for that after all?).  The avoidance of teenage high school shooters and slashers (bringing up the question of exactly why we haven’t seen any prom night shootings… I didn’t say it was gonna be a pleasant question).  I mean, it takes everything a 17 year old can muster to get through that night, but computers… well, they’re basically infants and yet we put such high expectations upon them.  “Don’t crash honey, this budget analysis is due tomorrow… oh, nah, we don’t need any protection!  It’s more fun without me sheathing myself with a ctrl-s.  I mean, doesn’t it feel good?”

There are reasons that those application thingies crash.  Good reasons.  Let’s look at one of the most frequently used applications by our friends in the Pacific Northwest, Word.  Here are the various reasons this CSBmonkey has experienced crashes in that most venerable of applications:

*Corrupted normal.dot file
*Corrupted MS Word prefs
*Damaged application
*Damaged word document
*Attempting to access a very large document across an unstable network and the connection being lost
*Sun spots
*Solar flares
*Magnetic fields too close to the computer in the permanent location
*Computer hates being used: a.k.a. the “I’ll show YOU!” syndrome
*Client has failed to meet the computer or the application’s emotional needs
*Screwed up auto-save feature not working properly (probably due to sun spots)
*Auto-Tracking of changes on in those apps (Did you REALLY want to track those changes?  Probably not.  Way to go.)
*Documents were read only and yet let you keep adding stuff to them.  That was funny, wasn’t it?
*Computer has the dumb.
*Infestation of gremlins
*Possession by one or more demonic elements
*Infestation of regular gremlins that don’t know what to do with data
*Karma: computer, client, company client works for, etc. up to no good or was up to no good in the past and now coming back to haunt everyone via the “freeze up Word” method (more common than you think)
*Internet Explorer 7 whacked the crap out of the Office install, and now it’s been uninstalled.  Praise be!  Everything will work fine after this.
*Small, microscopic black hole nexus point at the location where computer freezes up regularly and causing atoms in device to not react in a normal and predictable way
*Similar to microscopic black holes, there could be weird gravity at the location that causes atomic corruption on various levels.  IF ONLY WE COULD REVERSE THE POLARITY WE COULD DETERMINE IF GRAVITY ISSUES ARE AT WORK!

You can see that the reasons are varied, and many.  Your ethics and morals and status as a decent human being weigh heavily in wether or not your computer works properly.  Don’t think Word isn’t watching you.  Don’t think that Excel doesn’t lurk under your bed at night reading your thoughts about the babysitter (or the baby sitter’s brother).  Purity of thought.  Or essence, these are the things that keep a computer running properly.  That and a good tech.

This photo was found at the Chicago Tribue with the following text:

Taking up the habit
An unidentified Chinese woman holds her pet monkey who had taken up smoking in Fuzhou, southeast China’s Fujian province, Thursday. The death toll from diseases associated with tobacco is about one million Chinese annually, a figure that is expected to increase to 2.2 million per year by 2020 if smoking rates remain unchanged, according to the World Health Organization.

(AFP/Getty Images photos)
Jun 1, 2007

No word given on the current smoking statistics for monkeys. Note, this monkey is NOT blue and therefore may not be able to provide you with appropriate levels of desktop computing technical support. However, the chain around the neck indicates that the monkey may be employed in the field anyway.