Saturday 8 November 2008

Man vs. Machine: The Road to Victory

Yet again this Saturday post arrives in the Sunday mail, but this time alcohol is not to blame. Just take a look at this picture:


What does that look like to you? I tell you what it looks like to me... Victory. That, my friends is a Creative Zen Touch MP3 player - verging on obsolete - but given new life by a hard fought battle between me and Mother Technology. To Yuki, by the way it looks like a cassette player, but what does she know?

Technology: created by us to serve our every need. And yet now technology is widely acknowledged to be our greatest foe; and scuttlebutt on the grapevine names it as the agent of our eventual demise.

My MP3 player wouldn't work with Windows VISTA basically, and I was getting sick of the music that was on there so I resolved to fix it - or kill it in the attempt. Last week I almost accomplished the latter, leaving it crippled and useless for every purpose bar "paperweight". Then last night I had the showdown to end all showdowns, bringing it back to life, into the modern age and thus saving myself from having to buy an ipod.

What I did was update the firmware on the device so that it became PFS (plays for sure) enabled and Vista can recognise it as something other than a rock. You know what firmware is? I don't! I have no clue - I'm pretty sure it runs on good karma and well wishes and what I did last night was some kind of mystic incantation that has left some sort of net-God in possesion of three fifths of my soul.

What I did was this: I had to use Yuki's computer as it wasn't Vista and I deleted all the drivers and creative stuff off her computer. Then I deleted every Windows Media thing I could, then I deleted all the USB root hubs, then a box appeared on the screen saying "to complete firmware upgrade you must fight a bear". I clicked "yes" and the screen of the MP3 player lit up really bright, projecting a life-sized image of a bear onto the wall. Like a cheap sci-fi movie the bear stepped out of the wall, except it was all shimmery and blue like it was made of light, and it came towards me. It swung one of those big paws at me, but I ducked under it and slugged it in the gut. I punched it so hard that it exploded into pocky, dessert pocky to be precise, I ate all the pocky and the firmware upgraded.

Of course in doing this I also fucked up Yuki's internet so I couldn't post this last night, you know how it is.

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