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By Todd Stadler · Thursday, February 13, 2003 3:59pm

The past few weeks have not been kind to me.

In addition to fending off one (or possibly two) colds and indelicately edging ever closer to ages starting with a three, my computer at home has decided to antagonize me outright.

At first, it was just little things. My computer would take minutes to shut down instead of the normal seconds.

Certain applications, most notably Internet Explorer, would cause the operating system to crash within minutes (odd, that, given that IE is a part of the operating system, ha ha ha).

But what really pushed me over the edge was when the system decided to randomly change the fonts pretty much everywhere.

I suppose I could have tolerated viewing all my spreadsheets in italics. But I'll be danged if I have to read the freakin' New York Times in some bizarre uncial font.

That's when I decided it was time to reinstall Windows 98.

Unfortunately, things have not gone so smoothly in that endeavor.

For one thing, I have had to deal with the curse of owning a computer (it was a gift from a former employer) that had Windows 98 preinstalled on it. Which means I don't actually own a Windows 98 installation disk. Whee!

And then there are those components that I somehow got to work the first time, but I don't know what I did to make them work, and now they won't work when I try to reinstall them.

Loads and loads of fun, both for me to experience, and for you to read about.

Accordingly, I haven't put as much time into writing on this here Web page. Sorry about that.