COLUMN: Son, You Need to Slow Down

By Tobin Barnes
I crashed my home computer.

Again.

Yeah, it’s happened before. Couple times, actually.

This time I was taking a corner too sharply, I guess. Ran off the road and flew into a digital abyss. Fortunately, no one got hurt, but I wasn’t particularly perky when I found myself sitting amongst the wreckage.

Like a lot of other racers, I’ve never really known what the heck’s under the hood, but I fancy myself a top-notch driver, nevertheless. Learned a lot of tricks along the way so I can burn rubber in cyberspace.

Problem is, I get a little cocky sometimes. Old lead-foot syndrome. I like the pedal to the metal, see. After all, it’s all about speed, isn’t it?

But that’s what gets me in trouble.

Doesn’t mean I’m not concerned with safety, though. I’ve got a pit crew that supports me 100 percent. Or so I’d like to think.

My pit crew’s a back-up plan. Everywhere you look, they tell you to have a back-up plan. I had one.

I back up my stuff on CD’s and I even back up my stuff on an Internet site. But maybe that’s why I get cocky.

Start thinking crashes can’t be all that bad.

But hold on there, Parnelli. They can be. Oh lordy me, yes.

I figure it’ll take a couple weeks to get back where I was before.

Ironically, my last crash happened as I was supposedly backing up my system so future crashes wouldn’t affect me. For some dumb reason, I thought I could stop the backup midway through—a kind of digitalus interruptus.

Immediately, I got the message, “Stopping the backup now may leave your system in an inconsistent state.”

That would halt most geeks, but not me. Heck, inconsistent state? There’s a lot of inconsistencies in life. What’s one more? Ralph Waldo Emerson even said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

I clicked “Continue.”

And oh, fellow sinner...it was a mistake. I was already over the speed limit, hurtling for the hairpin turn and the greedy abyss below.

Yet even at that point I could have recovered, but no. A spasm of ineptitude overcame me instead, and I blundered into a series of bad decisions that produced a perfect storm of cyberspace destruction that seemingly laughed at my backup plan, then slapped it silly.

It left my computer virtually mindless.

When I tried to make it do something, its only reply was, “Huh?”

Well...I’ve learned my lesson...for the third time. I’m practicing safe computing from now on. Warnings will be heeded. Inconsistencies will be avoided. I will not “Continue.”

No saucy race course attitudes from me any more.

That is, until maybe next time when I feel the need for speed.