Snoqualmie

I am l33t as fuck!

My mission for tonight, which if I may say so I discharged with dazzling competence and aplomb, was to figure out on my own how to make the movies on the house's media server play on my computer. Or at least as on-my-own as my usual standard for computer-related puzzles, which is basically "do not give up and let one of your ubergeek friends show you how".

It's part stubbornness, part decent sense (there's nothing to be gained from remaining technologically incompetent except ever-greater unnecessary dependence on other people), and part one of those damn gender problems: almost all of my geek friends are guys. Certainly the first half-dozen names that come to mind when I think of asking for computer help are all male. It's not that I have anything against them -- the reason their names come to mind for help is that they're my friends, after all -- but as much as I don't like cultivating areas of inability, I dislike it even more when those areas represent things I can't get done without playing something as stereotyped as Maiden In Distress to someone else's Rescuing Male. I like to choose the times and places for my kinky role-playing, thank you.

Those times and places generally aren't late Friday night when I'm drinking tea in my pajamas and considering watching The Sword In The Stone before bed -- hence, tonight's successful quest. It took me over an hour of tweaking and reinstalling three different media players before I found one that worked, but eventually I was enjoying the misadventures of Arthur and Merlin with the warm fuzzy feeling of a job well and independently done.

All right, all right. I am not l33t as fuck. I am not l33t at all, and when I successfully resolve some utterly trivial issue like this and report my groundbreaking results to the abovementioned geek friends they either pat me on the head or laugh up their sleeves, which rather defeats the purpose. But she laughs best who works out the punchline herself, even if it takes all night.