Wind Chill Fascism

Well, it's 40 degrees outside, here in lovely Mira Mesa. For San Diego city, that's downright frigid. Although I'm a fan of cool weather, this temperature makes me glad to be inside my cozy apartment, drinking coffee, and reading the news. I expect to miss these nights soon enough--by the end of the week we'll be back to 80-degree Santa Ana winds. "Here come those Santa Ana winds again," Becker and Fagin once wrote.

Other than that, it's been a fairly craptacular day. It started off with the ventilator flashing "HW Fault," and Minda the nurse frantically trying to figure out what was wrong. The problem resolved after a call or three to the respiratory care people, who explained to her how to remove and vacuum out the small, rectangular filter on the side of the vent. These newer style vents, like my LTV 800, run a turbine that pushes air in and out of the circuit (tubing). They are basically a computer with a turbine attached, inside a box about the size of a laptop computer. And like any computer, they are prone to overheating if the fan ducts get clogged. Sigh...

Speaking of computers, my laptop computer is completely hosed for now. Harold evidently caught the "MS Antivirus" malware during one of his late-night porn junkets. Basically, it's a mechanical-electronic STD. Brad, my roommate, spent an hour trying to get an anti-malware program installed on the machine, but evidently the script that runs the malware is smart enough to intercept it and stop the installation. We'll keep trying, but I suspect a reformat and reinstall of Windows is in the works.

This is the second machine that Harold has bollixed up, in three years. I don't know what to do with him. He's almost proud of being computer-ignorant, and I sometims suspect he's got some passive-aggressive need to sabotage the computers. I only wish he'd take out his anger issues on someone else's machines! He screwed himself too, though, because his son's science project is on it, and the whole thing will have to be wiped, I'm pretty sure.

I did buy a neat little WD backup external drive on Saturday. Tonight I'll be backing up my desktop, which is crucial. If H. had waited one more week to screw things up, both the laptop and desktop would have been safeguarded.
Ah, well, what are friends for? Apparently to reinforce the need to counter righteous anger with bouts of Christian forgiveness.