Creative CSS - an oxymoron?

I can't stand the internet anymore. Everything is a template. Uniform. Pedestrian. Bland. Boring.

Sure, I'm posting this to a blog site that uses templates, but THIS IS A BLOG SITE. They use templates to make everything easy to use. This isn't my personal domain. This isn't my business domain. Neither of those should look like a blog site, yet the majority of the internet now looks like a blog. Everything is a template and it's freaking, driving me out of my mind.

Back around 1998, we used to laugh at how pages that were designed by programmers looked like programs. They were sterile and unappealing. The programmers would hire html writers to make their pages more interesting. Then, along came CSS. It's the unimaginative programmer's wet dream. The templates are like programs. You fill in your information and have a webpage. It's just enough different from the next persons to be different, but just enough the same to make the nervous programmer feel comfortable. What started as a convenience has taken over the net. Sameness. Sameness. Sameness.

I looked up uncreative css, to see what I'd find and came across this page. It was posted in 2001. It's only gotten worse, since then.

In an attempt to vent, I made a creative page. It's on my real domain, that I can't mention here, but I sent the link to a friend, after bitching about the sameness of everything. She sent me back a link to a page she made for me. IT WAS A TEMPLATE!

She actually read my complaint, looked at my page, then slapped an image in a template and sent it to me as an example of creative css. A template! Am I speaking a different language? Are there people, my friend included, who can't see that templates are the antithesis of creativity??

I'm an html person. I know html like nobody's business. I can put anything, anywhere with html. I'm learning CSS, but slowly. I love the fixed background. God knows how much I love that. Seriously, He knows, and He's a little concerned about it.
I cannot use a template. Templates are for convenience - for blog sites and businesses - or for stupid uncreative people. That's it. Those are the only uses. Any domain that isn't a blog or a business needs to get out of a template.

If you have an example of a site that hasn't sold it soul to templates, please comment with a link. Creative sites should be having a field day with the new options CSS allows, but I'm not seeing it. It's really easy to stand out in a field full of templates - JUST STOP USING THEM.

Is It Finally Gone?

I think I finally lost my old XP machine.

This is truly sad.
It wasn't a computer I used a lot. A friend slapped together some spare parts a long time ago, so I could look around XP and see if I liked it. It has (had?) a tiny, tiny hard drive and was slow as a slug, but I liked it.

About four years ago, I tried to turn it on and it made a horrible clicking noise. I had never heard of the 'click of death', so I just kept rebooting until it started - and it did. Whenever I turned it off, or the lights went out (sneeze too strongly and our power goes out), I would keep rebooting till the click stopped, and it would work. Yes, yes it would. For FOUR YEARS, it ALWAYS booted.

All my techy friends said the click of death was final. What do they know?

Sure, it could take anywhere from 3 to 30 reboots, but it ALWAYS would boot... eventually.

Sometimes, the screen would say 'no operating system found'. Oddly, that was a good sign. It would usually boot the next time I tried.
Sometimes, it would throw odd ansi characters on the screen - hearts, squares, blinking characters - but it always would boot... eventually.

Today, I was trying to start it, because the lights flashed a few days ago and it shut down. Now... it wants the cmos password. I never set a cmos password. I tried cmos, password, bios, the usual suspects. They didn't work. I went online and looked it up. Tried a few other known passwords. Nope. Three tries and:

System Disabled
My last resort will be to pop it open and pull out the cmos battery. I don't want to do that, but I can't take it anywhere to get someone to clear, or bypass, the password. I can't imagine what a real tech would think if I told them to 'just ignore the click of death, it will boot.' ::sigh::

I know, I should simply let it go. I know that. I could probably pick up a faster system with a bigger hard drive for the cost of the copper in its components, but I like my computers - I have three - and it's very, very hard for me to let one go. The other two computers, with three different operating systems aren't that computer. This computer - a tablet - has XP Pro, but it isn't Clicky, the Unbreakable.

Plus, there'd be a desk in my office empty for a while. I can't have that.