April 1, 2007
Spring has a habit of kicking my butt.
If you're a visitor to either my blog or our wonderful
Romancing The Yarn knitblog, you've already read my tale of Blue Screen woe. But for those of you who've missed it, my laptop shuddered, gasped, then died just two weeks before the end of a book.
This is not a good thing.
It is also not a rare thing around here. I did some flipping through old journals (and blog entries) and discovered that I kill a laptop every spring. Somewhere between March 1st and May 15th a laptop sacrifices its life so I can continue to write. Our guest room is a veritable electronic graveyard of dead machines I can't quite part with. (Just because I can no longer access the hard drive doesn't mean some other wilier, more devious individual can't. Beware the disposal of dead hard drives. Your info may be more accessible than you think.)
I don't beat my laptops with mallets. I don't throw them at televisions like Elvis. (Okay, Elvis never threw a laptop at a TV but that's only because laptops weren't around when he died.) I know my way around the apparatus, thank you very much. I am paranoid about maintaining my anti-virus programs, updating a couple times a day, running virus scans each night.
But they die just the same. I might as well stand in the middle of the New Jersey Turnpike on the day of the vernal equinox and fling my laptop into traffic in some neo-pagan sacrifice to the gods and goddesses who are clearly trying to tell me something.
Fortunately I'd been pretty good about backing up. Not great, but good. I've lost some records, some databases, a wonderful list of quotes. The book, however, was intact on four different external storage systems.
So once again spring kicked my butt. My perfectly serviceable Dell Inspiron 1000 joined the spirits of the late and great Inspiron 7000, Inspiron 8200, Compaq Presario, various Dell Latitudes, the IBM ThinkPad, the Toshiba Satellite--I could go on, but you get the picture. I'm typing this (tentatively, gently, cautiously) on a refurbished Averatec (why buy new when you know its days are numbered?) So far, so good. But hey, the season is young.
What's new:
Warmly,
On sale now:
Archived letters:
March 2007
February 2007
January 2007
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006
June 2006
May 2006
