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I love being a geek. It keeps me entertained for hours as I fiddle with endless gadgets, software, and websites. My geeky nature also gives me the urge to fix things that are broken, even if I don’t know anything about it. I will fiddle for hours trying to learn about and fix new things. Although my geekiness is great most of the time, there is a downside. This is what I call the curse of the geek.

The constant fiddling is great most of the time.  That is until I have a lackluster yet important task to accomplish. I have no problem accomplishing the task and am perfectly capable, but my fiddling nature can quickly derail me. The other day I had to start writing a paper for one of my classes. It wasn’t a large and unbearable task, just less interesting than some other things. I had allocated more than enough time to accomplish the task and write an amazing paper. I had a full day of writing and then a couple of spare hours to revise. All was on track, until the curse.

I was knee deep in the research aspect of my assignment when I took a break for some food. I decided to take this extra time to check on my blog and maybe polish up some posts. Then it happened, my site was having problems. I logged into my blogs admin panel and tried to load up the main dashboard. It would start loading, then stop a quarter of the way. Worse than that, it would take down the rest of the site.  I would get error after error that the server wasn’t available.  If I waited a few minutes, I could regain access to other parts that weren’t the main dashboard (like plug-ins, posts, or comments.) If I went back to the dashboard, it all went down again.

As you can imagine, I just had to try and get this working again.  I couldn’t leave my precious blog struggling to stay alive.  The thing is, I am pretty new to hosting my own blog.  Up until a month ago I have used wordpress.com or Blogger.  So when things went bad, I wasn’t exactly sure how to fix it.  After messing around for awhile to make sure it was a consistent problem I contacted support.  Things got more difficult because they couldn’t recreate the problem.  It seemed really odd that it only happened when I went to one specific page.  After 12 hours, they had given up and told me that I needed to upgrade to a Virtual Private Server because I was using too much of my servers resources.  That is ridiculous considering I get 16 or 17 visitors on a good day.

Eventually I ended up reinstalling wordpress and restoring my database from an old backup.  The site worked fine for about 10 minutes and then the problems happened again.  Cutting to the end, I finally isolated the problem to my theme.  After disabling a feature of the theme, everything is working fine for the most part.

The point of this long drawn out story is that my fiddling can get the worst of me.  I did end up writing my paper, but that was after 8 hours were wasted trying to revive my blog.  The paper turned out to be great, but I had to make sacrifices.  I didn’t get as much sleep and I had to postpone other projects.  Overall it just wasn’t a good thing.  This is what I call the curse of the geek.  It is the ability to get distracted and derailed from more important tasks by something that requires fiddling and has to deal with technology.