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.
Come this December, I will have been a Mac user for 6 years. I got my first mac (a sexy little iBook) for Christmas. My uncle was working at Apple in Cupertino which provoked me to look into Apple computers.
