Ok, I am definitely a product of the Age of Electronics. I had no idea what to do with myself all week without my computer. I had to (gulp)....watch TV! I watched all of the second season and half of the third season of Monk. Thanks to Tony Shalhoub for helping me make it through the puterless nights!
Seriously, how do people live without a computer? I had to get the weather from the newspaper! When I wondered about something, I couldn't go look it up on Wikipedia. I had to...just keep wondering. I had to call people on the telephone! It's ok, I made it through.
So, I got my computer back from the Nerdz today. New hard drive...again. And of course, I didn't learn my lesson from last time, and didn't back anything up. And they were unable to retrieve any files from the old drive. So I've lost all my photos again. And the flash files for the jukebox. I have to re-install all my software and hunt down the software that was downloaded from the net. So it will be at least another day or two before I'm really back in business. So bear with me.
WARNING: IRRELEVANT RANT: I spent last weekend camped out at the Texas Renaissance Festival. I took about 240 photos at the Festival, plus several videos at The Fire at the campgrounds of fire-twirlers and fire-breathers. Got back Sunday, downloaded them all from my camera, erased them from my camera, spent 3 hours cropping and resizing them. I still had some more work to do on them, so I didn't put any on the Internet yet. Then Monday, my 'puter suddenly fried, completely out of the blue. Or maybe I should say into the blue...that dreaded blue screen. So that's all gone. Including quite a few pics of local band E Muzeki, who played at the Festival...so it's a little relevant to this blog, I guess. All gone.
ANOTHER WARNING: FOR TECHIES ONLY: In case any computer tech type people are reading and would like to offer me advice on this, check it out. I think the data on my old hard drive might be retrievable. Here's why. Monday, the Nerdz guy came over. No matter what he tried, he couldn't access my hard drive (a SATA 160 gig). Finally, he took it out and put in an IDE drive. The computer booted up fine. When he tried to hook up my SATA to the IDE, the computer wouldn't boot, even when he took the SATA out of the boot sequence in the BIOS. Any attempt at reading the SATA caused a freeze. So he took the IDE and the SATA off, and hooked up a new SATA drive. The computer wouldn't read that one either. Doesn't that sound like a problem with the computer READING the SATA drives and not a problem with the drive itself? At the Nerdz HQ, they couldn't get it to work with a SATA, and had to do a "work around" and install an IDE drive instead to get it to work. So, Q for the techies: is my only option at trying to retrieve data from my old SATA drive paying a fortune to one of these data retrieval services? Any ideas?
ONE MORE WARNING: I MAY CUSS A LITTLE HERE: DELL sucks ass. I am never buying another damn computer from DELL. This computer is only a year and a half old and this is the second time I've had to replace the fucking hard drive. I've had all week to reflect on the wisdom of buying technology from a business that only provides a one-year guarantee on their product, unless you pay a damn fortune for an extended service agreement. If their products were truly high-quality, they should feel confident in guaranteeing them for more than one year.
Anyway, to recap...I'm mostly back. Bear with me. I'm bummed and out about $450 and lots of pics. And Dell sucks.
Covering San Antonio's music scene since 2005