Computer issues

So, right after I finished my blog post last night (literally while I was checking the page view stats like I do after every post) Beth the Laptop decided to turn itself off in a rather catastrophic manner. Just one of those moments when everything is working fine and then the screen suddenly goes "bloop" and you quickly realize how long it has been since you've backed up your hard drive. I don't know quite what happened and will have one of my tech guys look at it later this week but I have a feeling that it may be rather severely fried. I'm just hoping that I will be able to rescue the data. Even though all of my writing is on the blog I would rather not have to compile over 100,000 words of blog posts back into Word format just so I could keep all my writers journals together.

What this also means is that I have brought Julie the Laptop out of retirement for the time being. Julie was the computer of choice for the blog at the beginning and is still the computer that I am most accustomed to. I have had this laptop since 2001 and it went through grad school, the blog, and several attempts at writing a novel. There really isn't much that I have not used this laptop for. She's probably the best computer that I have ever had given that nine years later I can get her to run while Beth failed shy of the two year mark. (For the record, Julie is a Sony Vaio with a Julie Delpy screensaver. Beth was an HP with a Beth Orton screensaver. And yes, my computers all have names.)

While I do have a computer up and running there is something uniquely horrible about having your computer fail. Your entire life is tied up with your computer and the idea about being separated from your data and the online world is rather scary. For me it is more of a matter of being away from my information. I don't have my journal or my CD collection spreadsheet or the list of all of the books that I've read. None of that information is vital to my day to day existence and most of it could be recreated but it really is a huge component of who I am. I've kept the journals for 12 years now and I have each one in a Word document. Same for the list of books. It is kind of silly but it means the world to me. Luckily most of my pictures are stored in numerous places and my music still exists in CD form. I couldn't imagine losing my entire music collection in one instant.

Given that I am writing this online now I probably shouldn't say this but I think that I could survive without the internet at least in the short term. I guess I should temper that by saying on a personal level as obviously I can access the net from work. It probably won't be a bad thing if I spend less time online over these next few weeks. I could use some time away from Facebook and celebrity gossip sites. I don't have to spend all evening reading reviews of television shows that I have already watched to see if I missed some pithy comment that I could make regarding a line of dialogue. Sometimes you just need to turn the information spigot off. Maybe I'll do that.