« And will I return to academic blogging? | Main | It figures. »
January 29, 2008
I didn't abandon you, blog; Lappy abandoned me.
A variety of very demanding tragedies have made me crazy for the past two weeks. The most poorly timed tragedy was the loss of my beloved laptop, Lappy, the iBook G4. He was going on 3 years-old, and was a great companion who got me through some of my best writing to date, endured my fumblings in web design, and assuaged my computer disdain after some bad PC experiences.
Lappy, veteran he was, suffered an unpredictable fatal wound. I can't be sure how it occurred, but the logic board was shot. The Mac Genius guy said it can happen regardless of what kind of computer a person has, Mac or PC. It would have cost me more than the price of a new laptop to have Lappy repaired, so I put him to rest. Lappy breathed his last on my first day of graduate school two weeks ago. (See what I mean about bad timing?)
I scrambled over the course of the rest of that week to find a means for getting another laptop. I decided that buying a new one, with a new warranty, was my best option. I bought Maccy, my white Macbook, last Sunday--the coldest day of the winter so far at a whopping 7Âș, -4Âș windchill--so while Mike and I traipsed around Shadyside we toted Maccy along with us. There was no way a brand new laptop was sitting in my car to freeze or worse. I breathed a little easier knowing that I had a laptop, but there was still the problem with getting all of my stuff back...
Lappy was not only my means for producing schoolwork, but also my livelihood since I've been surviving by freelance writing, editing, web design, and tutoring projects alone. Suddenly all of my work was gone. Poof. Lappy wouldn't turn on, so how was I to retrieve my data? I do back-ups, but I'd been a bit busy and hadn't done one for a few days. No work = no paycheck. (Various bad words ran across my mind at this point.) After a few attempts by friends and friends of the family, I took Lappy's corpse to a professional yesterday. I read for school while I waited a few hours, since they did a "rush" job, and got Lappy's cold, dead body returned to me along with my external hard drive full of his entrails--my livelihood. A dead weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I hate to talk about Lappy like that posthumously, but really I needed his guts.
Maccy is great! Since getting my data back yesterday I've restored most of my settings and files. Right now I'm using Time Machine, part of the latest OS, to run an automated back-up of all my stuff (which the program will do each time I plug into my external hard drive). I've been trying to look at the positive side of this whole ordeal, since it's all been quite stressful, and here is the list of perks I came up with to console myself: faster processor, more RAM, bigger screen, more hard drive space, newer battery, brand new Leopard OS, new iLife '08 programs, iSight webcam, and a fresh warranty to lean on. And I got all my data.
Posted by KarissaKilgore at January 29, 2008 11:31 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blogs.setonhill.edu/mt/mt_tb-awoisdlkfj.cgi/11506
Comments
So sorry, Karissa. Loved the writing, though. Dr. A. would be proud, I think.
Posted by: Amanda at January 29, 2008 3:39 PM