I turned 30 today.

Most 20-somethings go into their 30s kicking and screaming. Some regard it as just another day. My reaction was different.

When Nadia turned 30, she threw herself a wonderful little party. Family and friends were there with her. She went into her 30s with a smile on her face and surrounded by family.

I went in tears.

My mom called me today, singing “Happy Birthday.” I started crying, as quiet as I could. An overwhelming sadness hit me, and I can’t quite put my finger on what it was.

A steady stream of phone calls and SMSes came in, the first at 5:15am from my aunt.

During the workday, I was a complete tool to everyone I worked with. I was short, dismissive, and downright rude. I silently cursed every coworker that didn’t wish me a happy birthday, even though it is printed right on the company’s intranet page. I did the same thing to my fellow Twitterers and Facebookers who said nothing, despite the hints I dropped.

The workday finally ended. I got a few very nice and overly generous gifts from my Nadia, her family and a friend of mine. I even got a lovely poem from my best friend. But I didn’t fully appreciate any of them, because I was too busy wallowing in self-pity.

I wanted to put together a LAN party with my fellow gamers for my 30th, because drinking Mountain Dew long into the night while blasting each other in Halo sounded like an awesome way to hold on to my youth. I wanted to have a happy hour with my coworkers, present and former, because they all became my friends over the years and drinking rum and coke into the early morning sounded like a great way to celebrate surviving another year.

But I’m here. In the middle of nowhere. I can count my friends here on one hand. My home is my prison.

I kept dwelling on the lack of control in my life. The house; I’m stuck here because we can’t afford two mortgages. The job; as much as I want to leave there is no market here for what I do. Then there is Nadia’s impending deployment; I will be here, in my prison, alone for a year.

Further diving into that endless spiral of self-pity, I looked again at those ideas I had for how I would have spent my 30th if I were back east. I remember my going away LAN party; one friend showed up. ONE. The others were my neighbors buddies. Then I thought about my going away happy hour. My current coworkers were there to see me off, but what about the ones who had quit? The ones that came out for other happy hours? They were mysteriously absent. Actually, not so mysteriously, and suddenly I saw where I stood with them.

(To be fair, one in particular showed up and made me very happy).

All this negativity kept pounding away at me, and I started falling apart. I tried to keep my shit together by working on one of the many computer problems my network is experiencing. Maybe I could solve one and make me feel a lot better! This was not to be; the only thing I’m good at, the only thing I know, computers, and I failed at it.

My dad called. He asked me, “do you have a birthday cake?”

I mustered every ounce of strength I could to sound normal, but my voice did crack. I told him no. I heard it in his voice, his disappointment. He was upset that he couldn’t be her for me, that I was so far away. His voice cracked too. We ended our conversation quickly.

There I was again, crying. No, sobbing. I sat down on my new (broken) recliner, and Nadia sat with me. I couldn’t believe it, a cake. The absence of a cake completely broke me down.

Reflecting on today, and the month that lead up to today, I’m learning that every time I say “I’m hanging in there” or “I have learned to cope,” I am lying. I’m in a very fragile emotional state, and I find myself lashing out at people who don’t deserve it or sneaking off to another room to cry.

I don’t know what to do. It’s been a month now, and I’m not getting better.

Both of our desktops are acting up real bad, and I’m beginning to think it is time to replace them.

Nadia’s WinXP computer seems to blue screen randomly when Media Center starts to record. When it tries to boot up again, an error about needing to put in the system disk comes up on a black screen. I have no idea how to begin troubleshooting this problem.

My Vista computer suffers from random IRQ-related blue screens. The only constant when they come up is that I click the left mouse button. The mouse is new, so maybe that’s it? Then again, these blue screens started months ago when I bought my new video card.

Then there is the annoying issue with Live Photo Gallery which will no longer import pictures from my SD card from the Autoplay window. I’m pretty sure this is related to the most recent Windows Update, and these guys seem to think so too.

Oh yeah, the Home Server I mentioned in my last post? It still backs up my PCs, but I can’t get into the console (the main application for the server) anymore. I can’t remote desktop into any of my computers using their names, I have to use their IPs. That’s a new issue, which came up after the most recent Windows Update.

I had to shut off Windows Media Player sharing (so my 360 can see music on my PC) because it crashed frequently and Vista told me about it all the time. COM Surrogate is crash-happy as well; sometimes it is video that causes the problem, but sometimes it seems random. Opera will crash once in a while when I try to close a tab.

I’ve got this neat Vista Sidebar gadget that lets me control my volume with the mouse. It would be better if it didn’t hang so frequently, forcing me to remove it and put it renable it.

That reminds me of the Logitech SetPoint software that came with my MX 5500 Revolution keyboard and mouse combo. Most of my keyboard’s functions are dependent on it, but it can only run well for a few minutes at a time. It then lags; keys and buttons clicked take many seconds to actually do anything.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. While I’m an MS fan, I’m finding it harder to defend them when my computer has become so unreliable. My birthday is coming up, and I toyed with the idea of going over to the Mac side. The high cost is the primary factor keeping me away from doing that.

Over a year ago I asked who would buy Microsoft’s Windows Home Server. I thought I’d buy one of hp’s MediaSmart Server EX470 as soon as it was released, but I ended up waiting a little while before taking the plunge.

Back in May of this year when I saw it on sale at Newegg, I placed my order and have been using it to protect my PCs ever since. Every night the two desktops and the notebook are automatically backed up. Not just a data backup; an image of the hard drives are taken. In the case of a hard drive failure or some other disaster, the included PC restore disc is supposed to make it easy to pull an image off the server and restore the machine to an earlier point. I got to test this out for the first time tonight.

When Nadia was off at a conference, she accidentally installed the invasive malware program AntiSpywareCheck onto the notebook. Do some searches on removing that app - you will find that there are a few files to remove, a DLL to unregister, and a ton of registry entries to remove. I went through them, one-by-one, and couldn’t find any of the things these guides pointed me to. Yet there in the system tray sat the annoying icon telling me to buy and install the full AntiSpywareCheck product.

After wasting my time with those guides and writing the ASC people a mean e-mail, I turned to my Home Server. If I couldn’t remove this thing, then I’d just roll back to a point before it was installed. That PC restore disc I mentioned earlier couldn’t have made it easier. It took about 60 minutes to fully restore the notebook, which is less time than I spent trying to remove the malware.

There are plenty of other things WHS can do, which I’ll go into in later posts.