Wednesday, March 07, 2007
On this day:

Ether-eaten blog post prompts furious flight to Firefox

I had never gotten the dreaded blue screen of death on my Dell Dimension computer until I "upgraded" my browser to Internet Explorer 7 a few months ago. Ever since then, I've been getting it with increasing frequency, to the point that it now occurs about twice a week.

The last time this happened, two days ago, was the last straw. I was working on what was to be my greatest, most brilliant blog post of all time when BAM! A blue screen pops up with a typical Microsoft-speak error message that was filled with pure-D gobbledy-gook. My whole unsaved work of blog-art got eaten up in the electronic ether, and you, dear readers, were deprived of what was sure to be one of the all-time masterpieces of blogdom. I would attempt to piece together the post from memory, but unfortunately, such originality simply can't be reproduced.

Studies have shown that such moments of meta-inspiration occur only once every 2.35 years. That just happens to be almost exactly the amount of time that I've been blogging. (I should note that these studies were conducted on chimpanzees, but my science advisor assures me that their conclusions can be validly extended to bloggers.) I guess that means I will be serving out the usual amateurish drivel for a while longer. Sorry, folks. I tried.

Never fear, though. I downloaded Mozilla Firefox today, and hopefully it will perform better than IE7. (It certainly can't do any worse.) So, 2.35 years from now, be sure to come back for a visit, K?

I'm not entirely convinced that the browser was the problem, by the way, but it seemed the logical place to start troubleshooting. I'll keep you informed. I think there may be some weird interplay going on between my web browser, firewall, and ISP connectivity software. Whatever it is, it's pretty frustrating. I actually liked some of IE7's features. Too bad Microsoft is so seemingly deficient in the quality control department.

Which raises a question. Has anyone else had this much trouble with IE7 or am I the only one?