What is worth failing for is what is worth striving for

4 January 2004

New year, new start. A time to consider new opportunities. It’s been said a million times already, and it’s only day four of 2004.

Most of us though are afraid to try something new or different for fear of failing. One statistic suggests 98 per cent of people will never realise their loftiest ambitions. How alarming. It seems to suggest we are all settling for second best in life. Or less.

So frightened are we of inevitable doom, we won’t take a chance, and peruse our dreams. I could insert lashings of rhetoric here. You only live once. There are no rehearsals in life. Just do it. I’ll spare you the drivel though.

Jugglezine’s* latest article The Pain and (half) Pleasures of Rejection (Wayback Machine link), written by Todd Pitock, suggests that in order to succeed, we need to find a cause or goal worth failing for. Something so fundamental and intrinsic to our beliefs, that failure will not ultimately matter.

It’s almost another way of saying that failure is a signpost found along the road to success. Falling down is all part of the process. And the importance of being focussed and motivated cannot be overstated.

Aside from our own inhibitions, the criticism we receive from those closest to us is the next biggest stumbling block. Sometimes our own doubts are overweighed by the negative perceptions of friends and family. Their disapproval can cut the deepest. It’s often enough to dissuade many people from ever having a go.

But it’s mind over matter. If our dreams and ambitions are worth failing for, they must be worth pursuing. Where would any of us be otherwise? If everyone were too afraid to take a chance and try a new idea? Still living in caves perhaps?

Hmm, how affirmative. I really should listen to myself more often.

*Jugglezine is no longer being published.

Originally published Sunday 4 January 2004.

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Vale Windows NT4, you were the best

4 August 2003

My days of working with the Window’s operating system NT4 are all but over. It seems ironic that this outcome was brought about while I was trying to install some updated security patches for NT4, from the Microsoft website.

After the updates had been installed, I was unable to dial back onto the net. When I investigated, I discovered that all the dial-up networking protocols had somehow corrupted, presumably during the installation of the new security patches.

Then I noticed something else. Various icons on my desktop where jumping around, or sometimes vanishing completely when I clicked on them. I ran a virus check, and discovered the presence of some sort of hack tool in the NT systems folder.

There has been an increasing incidence of hack attacks on PCs in recent months, which has partly been caused by security vulnerabilities in some versions of Internet Explorer, which allow would be hackers relatively easy access to susceptible computers.

Possibly hackers had tried to access my PC while I was in the process of downloading the security updates. Talk about ironic.

To complicate matters, my anti-virus programme wasn’t able to remove the offending item. It turns out this particular hack tool is a rather tricky number, as it attaches itself to various computer ports and cannot be deleted easily because NT4 considers it a running or in use process.

It was enough to make me reconsider my PC situation though. My current “home” computer is now over six years old, and in more recent times has been developing an increasing number of small, though irritating, problems.

While it is nothing that a full system rebuild couldn’t resolve, I have decided that since I am doing more work from home now, it is well and truly time to upgrade my computer system.

I have a philosophy of running things into the ground before I replace them, and since I have had, up until now, access to more modern and powerful PCs at work, I had not been too worried about replacing my aging home computer.

All going well, I should be up and running using Windows XP, on a new super chunky PC by early next week. I am now waiting to see how XP compares to NT4, as XP is based on NT4. Obviously there will be a few degrees of difference in terms of technology advances between the two operating systems, but it is stability I am more interested in.

In the almost four years I was running NT4, the system only crashed two times. I consider that an exemplary track record, given the OS (Windows 95) I used prior to migrating to NT4 used to crash at least two times a day.

Originally published Monday 4 August 2003.

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