The Chinese room

I first heard a couple years ago that the Chinese word for "crisis" was composed of two characters. The first, it was said, meant "danger;" the second meant "opportunity." This struck me as one of those claims that's fabricated out of whole cloth for a political speech or a mailing list thought of the day, so I Googled it. The skeptic in me was pleased to discover that I was partly right; while the first character of the word does mean danger, the second means a crucial point, which is not the same thing as an opportunity. Still, the saw was closer than I expected to the truth -- and whether or not it's true, it could be true. Many crises do contain seeds of opportunity, as much as I prefer to think of them as situations to be skirted whenever possible and torn through in the most expedient possible way otherwise.

Case in point: this morning my desktop computer got a virus. Actually it got the virus last night, but it wasn't until this morning that it quit working. Beyond my ability to fix; it wouldn't even let me reboot in safe mode. I handed it over to a technician this afternoon. He seems optimistic, but there's still a pretty good chance I've seen the last of my old compy.

So you have your danger. At the same time, though, it's an opportunity: I was going to need a laptop for Lover's Lanes anyway. This episode gives me the impetus to look into laptops sooner than I might otherwise have. I'm typing this post on a discarded laptop of my brother's to find out whether his oldish machine might nonetheless serve my purposes. (Two trojans in four hours so far, so early indications are not promising, but I've still learned something and will sleep well tonight.) Tomorrow maybe I'll go on Dell's website and see if there is such a thing as a high-security version of Vista for wi-fi compatible laptops. If, God forbid, my desktop doesn't come back to me all sparkly shiny and happy to see me, it'll just mean I'll have a laptop that much sooner.

I am philosophical to avert a nervous breakdown.

But it's still all true.

What will happen on the road if my computer gets a virus? I'm gonna be connecting to a lot of different networks. I'm going to need a first-class firewall, aren't I? I should find someone who knows more about technology than I do to talk with me about the challenges of cross-country travel with a laptop.