Abort, Retry, Fail? I’m working on Gina’s Dell Inspiron 3500 again. Now it’s consistently booting to DOS, which is easier to work with than a blank screen, though not much easier. It has hard drive problems and the VFAT system keeps getting corrupted. I think I’ve reinstalled it three times now. Scandisk sometimes crashes while trying to fix things (like right now. Please excuse me while I reboot). I’m hoping I can get it to boot to windows (I managed that once before, after fixing the VFAT thing) and move everything over to my Dell Latitude via a crossover cable (not that I know how to do that, but I’ll figure it out). I think I’ll have better luck with that than with trying to do the same thing with her box running DOS and mine running Windows.
Things seem to be progressing, I managed to make it through scandisk w/o a hang. Now I’m doing the surface scan, which probably won’t turn up anything. Then I’ll try booting to Windows again and watch it bring up a blue screen.
We’ve been very lucky here. Snow started comming down Tuesday evening and the University was closed all day Wednesday and Thursday. So we had a bit of a vacation with pay. And Fridays are always cake, so I’ll probably get to work on server issues and not have to deal with human beings. :) I want to put all of this server stuff behind me so I can work on my PHP and MySQL skills (and earn my way into a better job in a better place). That’s a far off goal, but I hope to make it there.
No word from Dr. Bennett on the thesis. That makes me a little edgy, but there’s nothing I can do about it. And that’s a bit of a relief. I think Dr. B and I are going to clash a bit on the definition of modernism. He thinks of it as the culmination of Enlightenment skepticism. I think of it as the ossification of the same. I think of it as the point at which the Englightenment started reading its own press and mistook itself for a new dogma rather than a way of thinking beyond dogmas. In some ways, I see postmodernism not as an anti-enlightenment movement but as an attempt to make the enlightenment more self-conscious.
But talking this kind of vague b.s. is the main reason I got out of literary criticism and moved on to something less vague but more useful (to me and to others). I’m glad, I truly am, that we live in a culture where we can afford to pay people to read and think about these things. And, to a certain extent, I enjoy that sort of speculation. But my enjoyment of it (and my skill at it) has its limits. I think I can do more good in the world (for other people and for my own family) by designing good web pages than by splitting hairs over the nature of (post)modernism. So, while I think I truly deserve this degree, I’ll only be a little upset if Dr. B. tells me the thesis is shit and that I have to give up on it. I guess I can always take the friggin written exam, though that would take more reading than I’m up for right now.