blufive

Done

Spoke to two estate agents re: value of this 'ere pile o' bricks
calatrice looked up approximately a bazillion¹ houses that have been sold recently in the immediate area, then we went and had a look at them for comparison purposes, to attempt to work out which of the estate agents is living in la-la-land
thoroughly discombobulated something fundamental in the guts of our primary PC² while attempting to sort out the technical difficulties with the new hard drive I fitted last week
swore
discovered it was worse than that, and the machine wouldn't boot into safe mode
or any mode more sophisticated than the BIOS, either
swore profusely
[repeat for a while]
calatrice had presence of mind to apply the JFGI paradigm more thoroughly than yours truly, and pointed me at a solution which (thankfully) bootstrapped³ me up to the point where I can get the machine to talk to me in useful terms
Laughed mightily at cavalorn's comments on the Finnish Eurovision entry while recovery CD returned computer to more-or-less normal operational condition.
thanked providence that we have multiple computers that can all access teh intarweb independently of one another
thanked calatrice profusely
watched Doctor Who

To do:

re-apply approximately a bazillion⁴ security patches, bug fixes, et cetera, courtesy of the Beast Of Redmond, that were wiped out by said recovery CD
... and relax.

¹This may be a slight exaggeration.

²Moral of this story: the Bus Master IDE Controller driver is just a tad more important than most other device drivers on the system. In fact, it needs "DO NOT TOUCH THIS YOU STUPID FOOL"⁵ written across it in big letters. Just for eejits like me. I knew it was important, but I didn't realise it was that easy to mess it up that badly⁶.

³Literally (computer science definition)

⁴This is less of an exaggeration than the other one

⁵I was (momentarily) tempted to use the tag that shall not be named there, for extra emphasis, but then I regained my senses and realised that, for professional web-geek reasons, I would be required to ritually disembowel myself afterwards.

⁶Second moral of this story: even people who work with computers for a living and should know better can trash the world with minimal effort.

PS: I think I'm addicted to footnotes.