Later in the evening, our friend Darren reminded me that I wanted to get up to see an exhibit at Allegheny College's art gallery called: "In Between: (re)Negotiating Ethnicity, Gender and Sexuality". I thought to myself that, since I had the day off, that I would head to the gallery on my way to repair the catastrophic failure my father had incurred upon our shared business computer. But, more about that later.
Below are a few images of pieces from the gallery:
I'd stayed up pretty late chatting with Keegan, so I decided to sleep in the next day and take my time getting "to it" as it were. I didn't actually head out to start crossing things off of my to-do list (no, I'm not the sort to have a to-do list, so this is completely metaphorical and I'm actually stretching the term to its absolute limit) until the early afternoon. So, I decided to hit the gallery first. Darren (the aforementioned friend) is an assistant professor at Allegheny College and the gallery curator. So, I stopped in to see him first. The gallery was actually closed for the holiday, but they hooked me up with my very own private viewing. It's good to have friends in the right places.
As a matter of course, each artist's work spoke from its own unique perspective and I will not describe each in detail. Rather, I would just like to briefly describe what the experience was to me: As I perused the work, I read the interviews of the artists to put each piece in context. As I allowed the words and expressions to pass over me, I began to relate many of my own life experiences to the perspectives that were presented before me. One of the ideas that seemed to resonate with me is that sexuality is much better expressed on a spectrum, or even a plane, than with the categories that we, as a society, have traditionally used to categorize people. I then realized that even though I had determined that my sexuality, by comparison, was much more traditional in nature, I had intentionally questioned myself at an early age (maybe 15 or 16) to determine what that meant. I did not immediately tell myself that "I like girls, so I'm normal" and leave it at that. I spent a great deal of my adolescence finding a place that I was comfortable with and that I enjoyed. In doing so, I was able to meet people with honesty, as I was being completely honest with myself. Also, there was a stirring of old emotions as I connected experiences of the artists to experiences of friends and loved ones that I'd either been a part of directly or I'd experienced through discussions.
After spending a good deal of time in the gallery, interacting with the expressions that surrounded me, I met back up with Darren and we had a chance to discuss the show. I just wanted to take a quick moment and thank him for taking some time to share perspectives.
As it turned out, that was going to be the most relaxing part of my day.
Keegan had upgraded the RAM in his aging laptop. An operation of which he was quite proud. However, shortly after turning his aging computer into a powerhouse, he dropped it. From what I could tell, he had damaged the hard drive and was slowly losing access to more and more data. I told him I would help him save as much of it as I could. So, from the gallery to Keegan and Kelly's house I went.
This was the simplest part of my IT day. Really, there were just some files that were inaccessible because their place on the disk had been damaged. I easily pulled all of the important household documentation, then I started trying to pull their photos. I initially tried to pull whole folders of .jpegs, but as each file transfer hit a bad file, the whole operation would collapse. So, I started pulling small chunks of data, restarting when a file failed. Though tedious, this was not difficult. We saved most of the important stuff, so we'll call this "mission accomplis".
I then moved on to what would become the most challenging portion of the day. I headed to Tom and Connie's (Mom and Dad) to finish the work I had started two days earlier.
The back story is that Tom had done "something" (he was never very clear about what he was trying to do) and basically destroyed the hard drive on the business computer. He had purchased a shiny, new 500GB hard drive and it was left to me to do the rest. He wanted to get Windows XP pro back on there as the operating system, but XP pro, without service packs can't read more than 132GB of any hard drive. So, I had to get creative.
I spent several hours reading guides and stumbled upon the term "slipstreaming". As it turns out, this is an operation that allows you to combine an old version of windows with subsequent service packs. This involves getting into the command line of windows and extracting, then combining all the files. What I was working with looked something like this:
Scary stuff as I haven't used a command line extensively since the early 90's and my days with UNIX shells. Fortunately, the guides I was using were pretty clear. It did take quite a while, though. And I had a stack of windows and downloads a mile high in order to do it.
I'll finish with just a couple pics of my desktop from that long, long night.
I just realized that all of that could have been a couple of different posts... I think that that's why I call these rants. Until next time, kiddos.
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1 comment:
The exhibit looks quite intriguing. I imagine the image with the bananas and the blank human was related to race?
Dad mentioned the computer crash to me. He's lucky to have you around to keep him tilted toward sanity while he pounds the line between it and the not so much.
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