I'm having kind of a horrible day.
My computer had a weird kind of crash, this morning. I think the hard drive is fine, but the ports bus seems partly burned out, so a bunch of the devices have become "invisible." Based on some rudimentary troubleshooting, I think it's a hardware problem rather than a software problem, since the problems are the same under Linux as they are under Windows.
I'm running under Linux at the moment, because it's easier to use Linux with a non-functioning mouse – which is one of the fatalities of this problem. I have no speakers, no mouse, no ability to plug in external storage – nothing USB works. I might be able to get a functioning mouse if I could find one of the old PC style mouses, but they're not sold in stores anymore – I have a quite old PC style keyboard I'm using, but the spacebar is "floppy" and the backspace is erratic. I am FTPing my most important files to my rarely-used server, because I guess I need to buy a new computer, and lacking USB ports means I have no other simple means of extracting data from my harddrive.
I went to the store earlier intending to shell out and buy a new computer, but changed my mind at the last minute because I feel such a major investment needs to be better thought out beforehand. Anyway, buying a Korean-speaking, Microsoft Windows computer is a major undertaking. Korean Windows is really the only option here – English-language Windows is possible as a pirated version, but every time I've tried to do an "official" upgrade I've been driven away by impossible-to-understand websites mediating the process – not to mention the exorbitant price MS charges for the English version in Korea. Korean Windows will mean spending a day with a dictionary in one hand and the system set-up windows on the screen, as I walk through getting it all working they way I want. Maybe I'll give a try at going to Linux full-time, again – it's been a few years since I last tried that, which might be enough time for them to have sorted out the truly annoying language-support issues that drove me away from it before.
I'll sleep on it.
[daily log: walking, 3km]
