Understand, I'm pounding away here on the same machine that I've had since Josiah Bartlet first fell off his bicycle. So it seemed reasonable to believe that there was plenty of crud and cruft to be moved to this recycling bin.
Thought about how I wanted to go about it, made a plan, made up a geeky little diagram of my new directory structure, and printed it out, so I could check things off one at a time. Slow and careful, don't break things, that's my mantra for today.
Since I was descending into the cobwebby nether regions of sub-sub-sub-folders that hadn't been opened since Acrobat 3 was in beta, I naturally had my good old Emacs program running. Emacs will let you open any file. It may look like gobbledy-gook, but Emacs will display it.
After a couple of hours of this, I'm starting to get really annoyed at the sound Emacs makes when you try to do almost any minor bad thing -- close a file without saving, go past the end of the file, what have you. That "NEE!" sound from that Holy Grail movie is funny once or twice a day, but it's starting to get to me.
Meanwhile, the clean-up is going well. The brilliantly logical directory structure is being fleshed out. Old crap is getting brought into the sunlight for a quick last look, and then banged into the trash. I'm imagining my hard disk feeling like it has taken off its too-tight shoes at the end of a long day.
Of course, this being Windows, one reboot was necessary midway through. I had made a thumbnail of every image file on the disk so that I could give them a quick glance. Got through that, and said, hey, no need for these thumbnails any more. I can always regenerate them. So I tossed all of the thumbnail files into the trash at once. They seemed to go there pretty quickly, but then Windows Explorer locked up. Then it locked the machine up. I guess it was pretty stupid for me to expect Windows to be that scalable. Ten files at once, ok. 100? Maybe. 1000? Evidently not.
So, I shut the power off, let it sit, turned it back on, sat through the interminable ScanDisk (I swear that's probably the program I've run most since I bought this machine. And not by choice.) Things came back up. Good. On with the cleaning.
Now the Emacs "NEE!" is really starting to get to me. I resist the temptation to fritter with the sound associations settings, and continue down my checklist. Changing the sound will be the reward for the housekeeping, I keep telling myself. (I have to leave the sound up so I can hear my email coming in, BTW. In case you were wondering. In case you're still reading.)
Getting to the last group of items on the checklist . . . cool! . . . hey! My Emacs isn't going "NEE!" anymore. Just a pleasant little "click," like a kindly but strict teacher tapping her desk with a pencil. What? Is this magic? Is this machine starting to fix itself? Well, push that thought aside, knock off the last few bits of clean-up, and reboot. Let's see if I broke anything major.
Windows hangs during shutdown . . . no prob, does this like one out of ten times . . . power off ... wait . . . power on . . . omg, I can't sit through ScanDisk again . . . might as well feed the cats . . .
Coming back to the computer, ScanDisk is just finishing and we go through the rest of the boot cycle. Hey, wait a minute! Where's that cool sound that I associated with Windows start-up?
Then it dawns on me. Dude, you moved your sound files.
So here's the point. On a reasonable machine, the instant Emacs stopped NEEing at me, I would have stopped and said, ok, what have I done? What did I just do? But no. If you run Windows, you expect weird stuff to happen all the live long day. I breezed past it.
Conclusion: it's not just that Windows is designed for dummies with all of its wizards and talking paper clips. It's that Windows is designed to make you dumb.
And it's not just Freecell, either.
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