Furthermore, the Powerbook has decided that all my shiny new blank CD-RWs from TescOS are top secret invisible read-only CDs, so I backed up the hard drive to my 4GB USB drive, and it took hours and hours, and the USB drive is now so slow that it takes 5 minutes to eject safely, and if I'd known I wasn't going to be able to do the install anyway I would have put the time into sorting out CD backups instead.
ALSO, I need more RAM, kthx. I am sick of waiting a week for my avatar's trousers to download.
I know this is all just trivial whinging, and mostly workaroundable, but it's making me stressed, all scratchy around the edges, all frayed. Impending-new-job stress, partly (how can I do a proper techy job if I can't even get my laptop working the way I want?) but also a more general stress that I don't have a good word for -- the feeling that everything just gets in more and more of a mess and if I could only stop for a day, or a week, or a month, or long enough to Sort It Out, then I'd be able to keep it tidy, but in the meantime the little bits of tidying I can do are just like trying to empty the ocean with a thimble. It's nowhere near as much of a problem with physical tidying, the house and stuff, as it is with computers; it's somehow easier to get a handle on the problem when you can pick it up and put it in a box, and when keeping random junk "just in case" is actually taking up space that you can see.
Still, computers may be bad, but minds are worse. I think I need to defrag my brain.