Momentarily, Temporary, And Please Stand By

When I was a kid, watching television wasn't always a simple as turning on the TV and watching a show. There were "Technical Difficulties". What the "Technical Difficulties" were was never absolutely clear but in many cases the local station - in my case CFQC-TV in Saskatoon would be able to put up a slide or have one of their announcers do his thing. It was usually something like "We are currently experiencing Technical Difficulties." There was then a vague indication of how long it would take to resolve the "Technical Difficulties." There was then usually an indication of the amount of time, not in minutes but in the use of words. It always seemed to the eight year old me that when the announcer said "Momentarily" it meant at most a couple of minutes. "Temporarily" meant longer, maybe four or five or ten minutes tops. The killer was "Please Stand By". That meant that the people down at the station had absolutely no idea of when this was going to be fixed and you might just as well turn off the TV and go read a book play outside for a while. I hated "Please Stand By."

We here at I Am A Child Of Television are currently experiencing Technical Difficulties. To be more specific, it appears as though my computer has given up the ghost. It won't boot or show the manufacturer's flash screen. The hard drive and both optical drives are operating but even attempting to boot from an Ubuntu Linux live disk did nothing. I suspect that the CPU is fried. The machine has been acting up for a little while - it started reporting hardware conflicts and refused to recognise that there was paper in my printer amongst other things, then on Thursday I turned it off and when I turned it on again nothing happened on the monitor.

I am writing this on my brother's computer - I'm house sitting for him again - and I have a couple of ideas to try to replace my computer that might work. I should be able to do another post on this computer but after that I don't know is Momentarily, Temporarily, or Please Stand By applies to my current situation.