Depression is an ugly beast...

I have been feeling increasingly itchy and depressed the past few days... I don't know exactly why.

I suspect it has to do with my imminent trip to Houston. I dread the hours I'll be spending while on the road there. I am not thrilled with my 8:30 pm to 5:30 am schedule while I'm there. And I really haven't given any thought to the road back... although that trip will probably be a lark.

My VAIO is not serviceable, and to tell the truth, my eSlate is not very useful in its present incarnation as a Linux box. Microsoft Word is the lingua franca for document processing in my line of work, and there is nothing that runs in Linux that comes close to Word for what I need it to do.

Moreover, I have yet to figure out the keys to the kingdom as far as typing in Cyrillic under Linux. I get the feeling that if I were to successfully set everything up to type in Russian, that I would then be unable to type in English.

As I type this, I am ftp'ing all of the files I've accumulated over the past ten days or so over to my desktop. Then I will coldly, deliberately, and with no malice at all, reinstall Windows on this laptop. I will then install Microsoft Office and any other tools I need to do what I do.

That will at least relieve me of anxiety over how I will continue to work while in Houston. This ethnographic text is kicking my butt. I'm probably about 30% done with it, and my slow progress can probably - at least partially - be attributed to the fact that I've been working at the store until about noon, after which I take a break around 1:30 pm to lunch with Galina, and then head back to the store around 3:30 pm to help with the last-minute UPS stuff. If I'm fortunate, I get upwards of three hours of keyboard time in a day. I'll have to do better than that to finish this puppy on time.

Only a few hundred files left in the ftp transfer; I'll probably leave just as soon as it's finished.

Cheers...

Windows File Protection...

Windows 2000 exhibits a take-no-prisoners attitude toward overwriting or replacing certain system files, including DLLs and font files. It is, in theory, possible to officially defeat the mechanism, but this article at the Microsoft web site indicates I'll need to have a debugger attached via a null modem cable to the system I'm trying to modify (after editing a Registry entry, yech).

On the one hand, it probably is a good thing, as it prevents installation programs from replacing and overwriting system files willy-nilly. On the other, it also prevents needed changes from being made, unless Microsoft approves them or unless the persons making the change are willing to jump through certain hoops.

Cheers...