I have spent the last two hours wrestling with a horrific monster of nerdly proportions. Ô the horror! Ô the misery! Ô the suffering! I signed up for and downloaded free Movable Type. According to the personal blogging élite, Movable Type is the brie of blogs, whereas Blogger is merely spray cheese. If your online name is Surly Snob, this simply will not do; I won't even eat mozzarella.

I have known HTML for a whole two months now and I'm satisfied with how my blog functions. I've learned to correct almost every mistake I've ever made and I've even managed to make up a few things without reducing the entire bazaar to a sputtering page of unclickable links and gibbering hyper-personal nonsense.

But now it occurs to me that those who deem Blogger like totally uncool are the same people who have posters of Xena plastering their bedroom walls and idolize Barbara Adams, Champion of Intergalactic Peace and Tolerance (who actually has a fan page...I am not making this up, you know). So that's why I decided to spend a couple of hours swearing at my computer and stomping around the apartment like a baby allosaurus. If it ain't broken, heap piles of steaming manure on it. That's what I always say.

After staring at a directory of unzipped Movable files freshly downloaded into my computer for approximately five minutes, I realized I had absolutely no clue as to how to proceed. "I know! I'll check the online instructions!" I thought to myself triumphantly. After staring at the online instructions for approximately five minutes, I realized I had absolutely no clue as to how to proceed. I felt exactly like I'd felt after having read the following passage from Star Trek: The Next Generation: Technical Manual, a book my sister sent me as I joke (I hope). Keep in mind as you're reading that the topic is something made up:

"A subspace field of one thousand millicochranes or greater becomes the familiar warp field. Field intensity for each warp factor increases geometrically and is a function of the total of the individual field layer values. Note that the cochrane value for a given warp factor corresponds to the apparent velocity of a spacecraft traveling at that warp factor. For example, a ship traveling at Warp Factor 3 is maintaining a warp field of at least 39 cochranes and is therefore traveling at 39 times c, the speed of light."

Of course! I am nothing but an ignorant fool! But not so ignorant that I can't search the entire unzipped Movable files for anything with the word "install". There turned out to be several, but they all seemed to pertain to magical feats that only occur after installation. In vain I raced my pointer up and down the files, searching for something...anything!...that ended with ".exe". Nothing was to be found.

So now the files have been removed from my computer. I hang my head in defeat. I could have been a glorious god; instead I will a mere mortal. Vanquished, I return to my dots and that weird orange color I can't replace with anything...a broken blogger.

Maybe one day I will be like Frank, who I am not implying is a nerd, who designs his own sites and could kick Movable Type's ass, and who on his blog gives you a choice of three styles in which to view his wackiness, manic, arctic teacup, and feline. Maybe one day I'll turn like Jean-Luc Picard to my computer crew and say, "Make it so." And it will be so.

[Disclaimer: Voyager and Enterprise are two of my favourite TV shows. What's more, I think Captain Janeway and 7 of 9 would be pretty cool to have a few beers with, if they were real people, which they aren't. Moreover, I would enjoy multiple sexual encounters with most of the male cast of Enterprise, and maybe even with T'Pol...or with 7, for that matter. No nerds were harmed in the writing of this bloggie, although I certainly wanted to harm a few.]