Friday, September 29, 2006

The Dog Ate My Homework! And I Don't Even Have a Dog! Or Homework! All right, seriously now. This is getting ridiculous. But this last time wasn't my fault! I promise! You know it's true because I used two exclamation points right next to each other. You can't do that unless something's REALLY, REALLY TRUE. Or, of course, advertising. This time, with a bunch of stories to tell, my hard drive decided it had had enough of life in this world. It began making a noise that sounds sort of like a clutch grinding, very slowly, while travelling up a hill. The blue screen of death appeared, and the computer shut itself down; and then it just sat there, defiantly "off". I could turn it on, and it would pretty quickly turn itself back off, out of some sense of self-preservation I suppose. And then the hard truth that all of us on Radio Userland blogs must face at one time or another: This stuff is saved locally, on my hard drive. It is mine to preserve, or destroy, or to be wiped out by acts of fate like a hard drive crash. Therefore, my blog... was gone, for all practical purposes. You can't post to it. You can look at your blog, on the internet, and wave your arms at it, and shout "I'm here! I'm here! I JUST CAN'T POST ANYTHING! And yes, I appreciate the irony of having just posted a big thing about how I'm going to post more often!" Data recovery on a single hard drive can be done for anywhere between $300 and $1,000; mine was looking like one of the more expensive breed, being a hardware failure. Have you ever seen a hard drive? Like, the actual drive, removed from its outer casing? They're pretty much solid blocks of soldered electronics. It's not like you just unscrew the old motor and screw in a new one; there are clean rooms, and de-soldering components, and it's all really difficult and expensive... and something of a gamble, as you're not guaranteed to recover anything at all. And given that I would have to choose between paying rent for the month of October and possibly having a restored hard drive, I choose rent. Which means that I have no blog, and no computer, either. Something of a challenge, that. Enter my friend Brendan, who is, as we speak, in Africa. Brendan is travelling the world for a year, because he wants to.  I am unaccountably jealous of Brendan, and not just because he bought a titanium spork in preparation for his travels.  But just before he left, the DAY before he left -- for AFRICA -- he dropped by work and handed me a hard drive, which he happened to have sitting around. Something he'd upgraded earlier, for a better/faster/bigger one, and just never got rid of it. So now it's in my laptop, and things are slowly returning to normal, although I've lost a ton of stuff in the process. All the writing I've done for the last six or seven years, all the drafting and CAD work and design stuff. Tax form backups, things like that. Thanks to Lawrence at Userland, who I suspect has had to do this a time or two, we've got everything back. Except, obviously, for the blog theme, which is nice and old-school. Takes me back, it does. And thus ends what is possibly the driest, most techno-geek centered post I've ever posted, and hopefully ever WILL post. But thanks for hanging out. If I can keep my hard drive from crashing, we might just be okay. Oh. And just between you and me? We'll be picking this up and moving it soon. Somewhere out there, in the universe of the world wide web, there's a site under construction that will take over when this one expires, in about a month. Bet you can't guess the URL. 10:31:58 AM    comment []