Life should be user-friendly

Life should be user-friendly, originally uploaded by gurdonark.

I figured out how to get the computer back up in safe mode, although I have not figured out how to get my "My Music" folder files recaptures (and may have unintentionally actively dispensed with these files).

Nonetheless, I am grateful for each of the following:
a. I got an external hard drive which has captured my most fun files for the past x months, leaving only those music files I did not transition over to the external hard drive as potentially lost;
b. I regularly upload mp3s of finished songs and of photos to external hosting sites, meaning that I will not lose the ones so posted even in the worst extreme;
c. CPUs are so inexpensive that it's not going to be hard to replace this one.

I would have long ago switched CPUs when the current platform began to wear out but for the Vista introduction. I was concerned that a couple of my favorite bits of shareware would not work with Vista.
I wish, though, that I could make my system stay in operating shape (and recover the music files) until Windows 7 comes out. Its XP emulator might be just the solution.

I do wonder whether it is a virus or a system flaw that set me back these recent weeks. I had noticed that Mozilla firefox crashed too often, suggesting something was not in ideal order.

Still, if the worst thing in my life is this particular crisis, I'm all right.

inventive

Can-jo, originally uploaded by gurdonark.

Everyone uses the term creative with a kind of mantra-like intonation that once was reserved for terms like "spiritual". I find something appealing in the notion of art-as-religion and religion-as-art. Yet I like the idea that people are inventive as well as, or in lieu of, being creative.

I like the notion that a kind of humility and self-sacrifice is necessary to invention or creative pursuits. I'm often amused, too, that people draw broad distinctions among different pursuits of invention or creativity, when the difference may be one of mode rather than substance.

I like, too, the idea that the true test of the value of creative endeavor is not money, or accolades, or even accolades by the *really insightful people*. The true worth of invention is and creativity and craft s the way that it gives life a kind of meaning. For some, it's unimaginable to live without those bursts of insight and direction.

I think it's an advantage, in a way, though, to enjoy creative pursuits but not to consider oneself particularly gifted or creative. To be second-rank spares one the burden of disappointment in oneself.

I read a weblog which made the well-trod point that perfection is the enemy of done. The key is not to be perfect--people are pretty much denied that by definition. The key is to do the things that matter to one--and to do them as tasks to be done.