It's PC gone mad

First an apology, of sorts, for being so quiet since... well, since months ago. I haven't been too busy to post, nor had I retreated into my man-cave and shut myself off from the world.

I didn't post for so long because there seemed to be so much I wanted to tell the world, yet I didn't know exactly what to say. Life has been busy, in all sorts of good and bad ways, but I've always been determined that this blog should never descend into the LiveJournal trap of "What I Did Today And Who I Saw When I Was Doing It And Why He/She Is A Total Luser". Unless I have some clear thought or issue I want to express to the world, I don't want to inflict my opinions on the hoi polloi. God knows, I don't need the typing practice.

However, silence is death in the Blagosphere, so here's a brief summary of some of my key events of the last couple of months or so:

• Spent a looong weekend doing Volunteer Steward work at The Big Chill festival with my brother & sister. This was an intense, exhausting, exhilerating, magical experience, and something I shall always remember fondly. I met a lot of lovely people, very few of the other sort, saw some unforgettable performances, did some memoir-worthy shit, and generally felt more alive than I have for months.
  Special mention to my brother, who has struggled with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for a very long time, yet put us all to shame with his enthusiasm and sociable toil throughout our shifts. My heart nearly overflows when I think about it now.
• Finally got my house fixed up, with a lot of help from my sister and her man, and it's going on the market now. I think I love and appreciate my siblings as an adult more than I ever did as a child.
  
• I've started running, because I'm rubbish at it and don't want to be. It's actually kind of fun, once you can find a decent pair of trainers that fit, and a decent running partner when you can.
• I've stepped up a gear in my Japanese studies lately, and the more I learn, the more I fall in love with the language. It's like a fire or a rampant disease, and I don't care.
• As a result, I've decided to apply to study it at Uni next year. Cambridge. Wish me luck...
• My PC died, horribly, catastrophically, in the worst way possible. Tech-geek warning:
  Everything was running off a 500GB RAID0 (striped) array. I was in the process of backing all my data up to a single drive, when it all went titsup. One of the two drives failed to initialise, and the backup failed, so I've lost the lot.
  Ultimately, I've lost every photo, drawing, document, song and email I've ever received or created in the last 10 years, plus a novel I was working on sporadically. I was devastated, but as the data is essentially intact (just not coherent) it can be recovered by a data-lab. It's just going to cost me several hundred pounds...
  So, I've decided to mothball it for now and reinstall my OS on a new drive - the data is there, and I'll get it back one day.

So that's why I've been offline for some weeks. This is a courtesy-post to apologise to the world (that little corner of it that knows and cares) and tell you that I'm still here, still thinking, still thinking of you.

I've just not been desperate to get back online. It's amazing how much more I'm getting done now I don't spend so much time at my PC (and in retrospect, I'm surprised at how much time that was), and how much more I want to do. The interwebs had filled the void left in my life by the TV, when I made that Big Decision all those years ago, and I realise now that I don't want that void at all.

My "passive entertainment" organ can shrivel up and die now; I just don't care. I'll be back one day, but by then I hope my appetite for this world, this place-that-isn't-a-place, will have atrophied.

I do still miss it though.