So, another year is over and the Dark Lord Char’Nagh is handing out guns to those thoughtful enough to leave him sacrifices. Truly a festive time. And in the end, I would say that as years go, 2009 wasn’t all that bad to me. Sure, I didn’t travel as much as I would have liked, but I made it to Winnipeg and that’s a place I’d never been before. And sure I’m still in the same Worthless Job I’ve been in for so long, but at least I continue to abhor it and don’t simply accept the world as it is. So, I’ve got that…

Plus, this is the year I finished Adventure Dennis. Perhaps it isn’t something that should have taken five years to finish, sure, but at least it is done. I have way too many ideas in my head. I start something, then lose focus and lose interest and start something else. It means a lot to me when I actually finish a project and can finally put it behind me and have a little bit more room in my head for all the other things I must focus on. Let’s see if I can’t finish a few projects this coming year as well.

Yeah, this is also the year I was nearly done a book and lost it all when my computer died, but I’ll focus on Adventure Dennis for now.

Previously on Book of PDR:

I had a computer virus which was quite mean and tenacious. My inability to get rid of it annoyed me, but having cleaned as much as I knew how to and enough to continue doing most of what I needed to do, I was content to let it be.

Last week my computer seemed to magically clear itself of the virus. Scans turned up some corrupted files that had been missing not been detected before and it cleared them up. Then I could do the two things the virus remnants had not been letting me do: I could defragment the drive and I could update my anti-virus software. But then it all went bad. Suddenly my computer was saying that I had 98% free space or something like that. I figured that was not good. Then the computer shut down. Also not good. The computer can no longer start up because it says it lacks an operating system. That, I can can only assume, is the final straw of not good. It looks very likely as though my computer died and lost everything saved on it. Music, photos and most devastatingly everything I’d written within the last six months or so is apparently gone. Skynet won that computer.

Now, obviously I am using a computer to write this. What I did was go out and got myself a laptop and now I am using this for my computing needs. I have a tradition as far as naming my computers. The first was Computron. The second was Computron V. The third was Computron X. This new laptop is Computron Rex. Welcome to the family Computron Rex, we all hope you’ll enjoy your time as PDR’s machine.

On top of that when I got the Laptop and got back on the Internet, my little site here was gone. Server maintenance it seems. A week I was without the writing stored here and most of my other writing gone, I was mad with insanity from that I was gone. But now it is back and I have learned a lesson about backing stuff up. Everything.

Previously on Book of PDR:

When a webcomic mentioned an obscure physics term, PDR tried to use Google to find out what it was. He ended up with a computer version of a virus inside his computer. He cleaned his computer and got rid of the virus enough so he could still operate it for his limited needs, but he knew the virus was still there. He thought it would not matter. He did not realize that it was SKYNET!

Anyway, I just spent like four or five days without the Internet. I guess my virused-up computer was sending out spam or something, so my provider shut me down (without actually telling me, just for the record). Anyway, I seem to have cleaned up the thing now. Maybe next time I’ll try a little harder to prevent this sort of thing.

Now to get caught up on all the Internet I missed over that brief time.

So it has been about nine months since my last post. The reason being: I was adopted by pirates. That, or it’s been a few weeks and I’ve just been lazy. Though I can use the slowness of my spyware filled browser as part of an excuse…

Now, on a daily basis I come up with fascinating things to write about on my little journal thing (and as you readers know, on a bi-annual basis I actually get around to posting one!) so let’s see if I can’t remember some of the things that occurred to me over the past few weeks, lest this become yet another post in which my only content is a reflection of the lack of content.

Winter has hit us here in Hali-town. We’ve had several snowfalls already. We’ve probably already had a quarter or more of the total snows we had last year, which I don’t remember being quite so busy. I have noted that these days any time it snows is referred to as a
“snowstorm”. It’s never just snowing anymore, it’s always a “snowstorm” and the whole city shuts down and schools are cancelled and people start crashing their cars all over the place and all that. I think back to my childhood and remember us actually getting far more snow and the city not breaking down. My question is: Has the snow actually somehow become more violent even though it usually clears up before we get towering snowbanks, or has the city just become one big collective weather wuss?

It also occurred to me at one point during these weeks that I don’t know my own age as readily as a person is probably supposed to do. I have to think about it longer that I probably should. Is that a bad thing? A plus side is that I’ll be thinking about how I’m twenty-eight and then realize, oh wait, I’m not twenty-eight yet and won’t be for over half of a year and it’s like for a moment I got a free bonus year.

Haiku!

My suicide tooth.
I can break it when I want.
But can it break me?

A few weeks back there was a night when I only three hours of sleep (actually there have been several like that since my last post, but I’m talking of a specific one). The thing is, the dream I had felt like it took at least three hours if not longer. I understand the thing about dreaming actually taking place in a shorter amount of time than it feels, but it really felt like I’d been dreaming longer than I’d been asleep. Anyway, the dream was about me conducting job interviews for some position that doesn’t exist in reality at some business that doesn’t exist in reality. I apparently had two openings and four applicants (three women, one man). Over the course of the interviews it occurred to me that the man was a complete moron and that I’d two of the women would be getting the jobs and I was starting to get worried that people would talk about me filling the business with just women (you know, like “Look at PDR over there building himself a little harem…”) and I was spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to do it tactfully. It wasn’t easy considering I had been conducting the interviews in a crowded cafeteria with each of the applicants sitting at a different crowded table but totally able to hear the other interviews. At any rate, I managed to awake before I actually had to do anything. For the record, the third woman who was interviewed was also a moron.

Also for the record, outside of the dream, my harem is totally hiring.

I was going to do some commentary on Christmas as well while I was here, but this is long enough and why waste the content of a post I could do “tomorrow” right?

My computer caught the spywares!

Of all the cool ways I could have got malevolent program things onto my computer, looking up physics stuff has to be the lamest. And it doesn’t help that I still don’t understand physics.

It has been a long time since I’ve had any kind of viruses or whatever. A long time ago on my last computer I used to get them all the time. There was a website I would use that could scan my computer and tell me where the badness was and then delete it. I do not recall where that website is.

I would be okay with the nonstop popping up of “Your Computer Is Infected” messages that try to get me to download stuff. I can ignore that. But it also seems to be slowing my computer down. And just as Left 4 Dead was released too. Not fair.