Lovely blog post by Andrew Brown.

You know that feeling when you are sitting on the floor by the dusty disassembled guts of a computer and nothing works at all? It won’t even give a healthy cheep on startup? And then, slowly, it all comes together, until everything works, except, perhaps, sound, and you change something to fix that, and then nothing works at all again: you’re back in the smell of dust and silence and you can’t undo?

You will swear, when you finally recover, never to upgrade anything again. Yet you will. And I don’t know why, or didn’t, until I stumbled on a lovely passage in Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine, still the best book I know about the psychology of nerding…

He’s right about Ullman IMHO. Go to the link and read on.