I got a BSOD the other day, while harmlessly searching for an original Churchill citation, via Google Chrome on a semi-ancient Acer laptop loaded with Windows Vista Home Basic.
Hello darlin’. Nice to see you. It’s been a long time. You’re just as lovely as you used to be. (Apologies to Conway Twitty and George Jones.)
I’m reasonably sure Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer (who are my age) and all the rest at Microsoft have taken a few years off of my life during my decades of becoming an unwilling DOS/Windows demi-guru, forced to learn far, far more than I’ve ever wanted to learn about how the world’s most powerful kludge works.
To be sure, I’ve purchased and used several Apple products as well, but have found neither nirvana nor religion there. So I quit smoking and started eating oranges long ago to counterbalance the toll these Redmond Sons of Babbage are taking on me.
But the blue screen caused no real harm or foul (so far), leaving me free to muse and write an article about the new Azure and the upcoming Windows 8, while contemplating our steady march to the Heat Death of the Universe along the way.