Computer Update

Greg took the laptop apart and let it dry out completely. Thursday night while M and I watched the LOST season finale, he put it back together. In true Dharma fashion, the green power light came on but nothing else.

The verdict is still out on the hard drive. Thanks to Matt's suggestion, I went out to buy a hard drive enclosure, but Best Buy only had one and it was 4x the price of the ones I found recommended online. I don't need a padded case to carry the drive in, I just need something that will recover my data.

Since then, I added the shortcut address to Google Docs to my address book and am developing a system for backing up all (important) documents. I can live without copies of old conference programs, but I can't afford to lose my dissertation materials or grade books.

Even though we weren't planning on buying a new computer for a while, we ended up buying a new one yesterday. Just last week, I was reading an article about how much energy is wasted in the production of new computers. My laptop was definitely in need of an upgrade, but it wasn't totally useless (at least until it met the cup of Diet Dr. Pepper). Greg has my sister's old laptop, which is a very portable Dell Inspiron 300m that worked better for mobility than my paper weight of a laptop. In order to allow me to grade and write and research and stay married to someone with a computer degree we need two computers. We opted for a Dell desktop this time. Greg doesn't really have a need to take a computer with him anywhere except when we travel, so we opted to maximize the power and speed for our $ with a desktop.

The new computer will be here next week sometime, the hard drive enclosure hopefully sooner.

The Death of a Laptop

My laptop is in a million little pieces on our living room floor. Last night I spilled Diet Dr. Pepper on it and fried it. Technically, I don't know for sure that it is gone, but the screen was frying as Greg was trying to pull the power. Unfortunately, I recently went through my email and downloaded a bunch of files in order to clean out my email. The plan was to then back up everything and reformat the laptop in the next couple of weeks. The hard drive appears to be okay (Greg took the entire computer apart and the hard drive wasn't wet at all).

I don't hardly ever drink soda anymore, and I never drink it that late a night. I literally sat down to check email for just a minute, and before I knew it I was sobbing on the phone to Melissa while Greg was taking the laptop apart. Luckily, this did not happen in the middle of a semester (or worse at the end of a semester). However, there were a LOT of files on that laptop that I don't have backed up elsewhere. Dissertation materials, syllabi and teaching materials, gradebooks, conference papers, primary research, and 6 years of grad school work. I have several documents on my flash drive (Thanks to the fact that in order to print at work, we had to use a computer that wasn't connected to the internet).

I'm probably going to send out a mass email to colleagues and professors with a "if you have anything" will you please send it back to me plea. Then I'm saving everything to Google Docs. Looks like I will be computer shopping sooner than I had planned.

Decaffeinated

One of my proudest accomplishments this semester is the fact that in my final weeks of course work, I also managed to give caffeine almost entirely. Rather than the daily mug of coffee plus several sodas, I am down to a handful of caffeinated beverages per week. This morning I had an entire cup of coffee, which is rare, but at least 3 days a week I go without caffeine at all. I don't know that I will give it up completely because I really do love Diet Dr. Pepper, however, I didn't know that it was possible to be in grad school without being constantly caffeinated.