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Artificial intelligence

– A Harrowing True Story of Truth and Harrowing –

On Sunday night I was scheduled to play two hockey games, one in the 7:45 slot (Capitals v. Wizzards) and one in the 10:15 slot (CCM v. Blues).  Here’s what that means: I would play my B-league game for 60 minutes, sit out the second game, then play my A-league game.  This is a bit tiring, needless to say, but it’s easier (at my age) than playing games back to back, so long as I warm up adequately for game two.

But what to do with the down time?  I’m a busy man with a looming book deadline, after all, and I just can’t sit around in hockey rinks for 75 minutes with nothing to do.  So I brought my laptop to the rink along with my hockey gear, thinking that I would answer email between games.  Most of it was standard business mail, like “thanks for your essay,” “you need to revise that other essay,” and “when are we ever going to see that essay you promised us by November?” Some of it was casual correspondence from friends.  The usual.  And I thought that if I got my email in-box all clear on Sunday night, I could get right to work on chapter six first thing Monday morning, and finish it by the end of the week.  Which would leave me with only a short conclusion to write– along with the brief talk I’m supposed to give at my old school, the U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, at the end of the month.

So, dear reader, you understand that I was full of good intentions, doing my due diligence.  Except that when I plugged in the laptop, it didn’t . . . what is the technical term?  ah, yes– it didn’t work.  It wouldn’t even get past the “boot” screen, with the little Gateway and Intel emblems, and the keyboard appeared to be locked.

OK, you say, it’s a case of a Frozen Laptop.  Happens to everyone.  True enough, but– as the chill began to creep over my limbs– the frozen laptop in question contained the last two chapters of my book as well as my notes and drafts for the final two chapters.  Basically, everything I’d written since the New Year and hadn’t yet sent to my editor. 

But what about my backup copies?  Well, thanks to the fact that I got myself a sleek, thin-as-a-deck-of-cards laptop last August, I don’t have a floppy-disk drive anymore, so my only backup is a detachable zip drive, which I use every couple months or so.  In other words, I didn’t have backup copies.  But what about my hard copies?  Even in the summer of 2003, when my 13,000-word introduction to The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies mysteriously disappeared from my hard drive one evening just as I was preparing to ship it off to the publisher, I had a 40-page printout sitting on my desk.  And the prospect of retyping the thing from scratch, after finally putting together a project that had taken me three and a half years to complete, nearly brought me to tears.  But this time I didn’t even have hard copies, because . . . and here’s where the story gets involved . . . my laptop’s USB ports mysteriously kind of fried themselves three weeks ago, and I’ve been working without a mouse and without a printer ever since.

Why didn’t I bring the damn computer into tech support right away, you ask?  Because I’m a blithering idiot, that’s why, and I thought that I should finish the book first and then see what was going on with the USB ports.  Since the laptop wasn’t even recognizing that it had connections to its hardware, I feared that this was going to be a genuinely serious problem, so, of course, I put it off!

So there I was, half-dressed in my hockey gear between games one and two, thinking to myself that my ailing, six-month-old computer was now truly dead, and that I’d lost about five weeks and seventy-five pages of work.

What was curious about the panic that overtook me was how gradual, how gentle it was.  I could feel my chest tighten, but it was tightening very slowly, as if I wouldn’t really have to worry about actually suffocating for another few hours or so.  I began thinking over the arguments and narratives of those two chapters, and whether I could re-create them note for note; yes, I thought, I can probably come up with some plausible version of them, perhaps by the end of March.  But then I began to wonder whether I could even bear to try.

By that point I realized there was no way I could play game two.  I had to go home and try to see what was wrong with the laptop.  This made no sense, of course– unless the electricity in my house was somehow going to heal the computer where the rink electricity had failed– but I just couldn’t see myself concentrating on the game while desperately trying to remember the details of a 25,000-word chunk of writing.  So, making an incoherent apology to one of the players who, like me, was waiting around between games one and two, I undressed, showered, drove home, and plugged in the laptop again . . . with no luck.

I slept about three hours Sunday night, and dreamt about connecting computers to telephones and microwaves.  From 3 a.m. to 8 a.m., I made notes for rewriting those chapters.  Then at eight I brought the laptop to the English department’s tech support department– where (you knew this was coming, right?) it promptly, happily, and inexplicably booted up without hesitation.  I immediately sent those chapters to my editor, and then (since I still couldn’t print) sent copies to myself and retrieved them on my office desktop.  Today, I dragged the damn laser printer into my office, hooked it up to the desktop, and printed hard copies of both chapters.  But now– even as I type this (on the desktop)– the laptop is in the shop, and it looks like those USB ports truly are beyond repair.  Which means not only that I can’t print from and can’t use a mouse with the laptop, but also that I won’t be able to use the zip drive, because the damn computer still can’t “see” new hardware.  To back up my work since my last zip, I’ll basically have to email everything to myself as attachments and refile it all on this end.

Once, nine years ago, the very first laptop I owned (and on which I wrote Life As We Know It in the fall of 1995) crashed as I was writing a 50-minute talk that I was supposed to deliver the next day.  The talk was about a couple of Richard Powers’s early novels, and I had just gotten to the point of the paper where I was about to discuss varieties of human and artificial intelligence in Galatea 2.2.  I am not making this up.  Then when I asked the laptop to open the pod bay doors, it told me it was sorry, but it couldn’t do that.  What’s the problem? I asked.  I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do, it said.  Then it told me that this conversation could serve no purpose any more, and it shut down.

I just don’t seem to have any damn luck with these things.  But still, I am vastly, vastly relieved to have my chapters back.  Thank you, Hal, for at least that much.

Posted by on 02/15 at 11:23 AM

  1. You were lucky, Michael. Next time that goody two-shoes math coprocessor won’t save you! Bwahahahahaah!

    Posted by  on  02/15  at  12:41 PM

  2. The “never again” strategy:

    1) get one or two of these, or something very like them. Durable, cheap enough that a Penn State instructor can afford them, and technonifty.

    2) plug flash drive into USB port before it fuxors itself.

    3) Change settings in Word (or whatever) to autosave to flash drive every 20-30 minutes (or however long you can stand to retype).

    D) do not leave flash drive in rink seating or on bus by mistake.

    and viola! Instant ass saving!

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  02/15  at  12:55 PM

  3. I have a PC at work and a Mac at home, and I used to have a Sony VAIO, which was the biggest piece of junk imaginable. My PC crashes all the time; my Mac never does. The new operating system is unbelievably stable. And Macs are relatively immune to viruses, too. Just a thought ... albeit not a very helpful one, under the circumstances.

    Posted by  on  02/15  at  12:57 PM

  4. Um...new laptop?  I know you aren’t made of the garish paper simulacrae we like to call “money,” but is seems like you might want to get yourself a nice PowerBook or Dell L’attitude with a little thing I like to call “wireless” (and spring for one of those little chaos-theory iPods while you are at it to store files and listen to the soundtrack from “Slapshot” [and share the love with your teamies--it makes hockey players melt]).

    Posted by DocMara  on  02/15  at  01:07 PM

  5. Did your team win the second game, by the by?

    Posted by DocMara  on  02/15  at  01:08 PM

  6. Hmmm...this sounds like it might be the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy at work. The EXACT SAME thing happened when I was working on the Dean campaign (a liberal organization often targeted by the VRWC)… Several staffers had new laptops, and they too had “fried” USB ports. Uh huh, that’s what I’m thinking. They’re frying these things through the airwaves, or possibly through dental fillings.

    Get a Mac. They’re (so far) impossible for the VRWC (and their minions, Spammers) to penetrate.

    Posted by Kathy  on  02/15  at  01:27 PM

  7. Whoo-hooo!  I had #3 in the “get a Mac” pool.

    (Full disclosure, as Lenny with his word-a-day calendar:  “Oh, I concur.")

    Posted by  on  02/15  at  01:43 PM

  8. My Dad, the amateur novelist, was the only victim of Y2K that I’ve ever heard about.  He was writing his multivolume historical fiction novel about the Fall of Rome and the Rise of Christianity, and he never bothered to reacclimate himself to a Windows-based Word App. even by 2000.  He was still using Word Version Negative 3.0 with the blue screen and blinking block cursor.  So around the turn of the millenium, his computer ate his novel, literally hundreds of pages that took him 7 years to write (all his backups were on ancient, unreadable floppies).  I shit you not.  The End.

    Posted by  on  02/15  at  02:14 PM

  9. Michael, Michael, Michael. You missed the second game? Where are your priorities? Let’s keep this between you and me, because if Jean Ratelle ever got wind of this story, why he’d disown you. Chris, you’re asking, have you ever lost anything on a computer? I have. The first draft of my dissertation-- a brilliant comparative analysis of Wittgenstein,Austin, and Eddie Giacomin—gone into the ethereal realm we call the Internet. But that very night, weeping into my fourteenth beer, I watched the Rangers lose in overtime to Detroit. Now that hurt.

    Posted by  on  02/15  at  02:41 PM

  10. My mother is a writer, and has the usual circle of writer friends. One of them lost 5 years of work on a dead laptop, though everybody suspects that it was a convenient excuse to chuck the entire project and start a new one without having to admit that he pissed away 5 years of his life on an unsuccessful project. Damn that laptop!

    Mom prints out her new work every single day. She has piles and piles of rewrites in file cabinets. I have to get her a new printer installed every couple of years, because she wears them out.

    Posted by  on  02/15  at  02:47 PM

  11. Yeah, get a mac. Use the wireless to zap multiple copies of important stuff to the swarm of other computers you keep in your house and at work, like I do.

    Just use all the money the Bush administration has been funnelling to us blogocrats. That $30K* he sent me to modulate my comments about his administration has sure come in handy, and isn’t it nice how relatively polite I’ve been to Republicans ever since?

    *I’m cheap. But still, the wad of cash that secret service agent pulled out of his pocket was much more than I’m used to seeing.

    Posted by PZ Myers  on  02/15  at  02:48 PM

  12. Nothing is ever “gone for good.” ANYTHING is retrievable!! Trust me on this! If you don’t believe me ask the FBI.

    Once upon a time I was the “computer guy” for a very notable professional sports team. The president of said team lost his laptop hard drive and all of the 00-01 scouting reports, draft perspectives, blah blah blah. Very very tense situation. Either way.... we sent the HDD to a lab in New York with a clean room and for $2,000 and a weeks time we had our data back.

    The point.... it’s not a matter of if you can get it back. It’s a matter of how much is it worth to ya!

    Posted by  on  02/15  at  02:53 PM

  13. I know Mac Evangelists are intolerable, but it really does seem like the best solution.  Getting an iPod to do back up would be fun and useful, but I’m guessing mostly fun.  Those key drives are kind of cool too.  You can’t be too careful.

    And ibooks aren’t *that* expensive all things being equal.

    Posted by  on  02/15  at  03:05 PM

  14. Should be no problem about missing the game.  That other Berube (things over the ‘e’s) won’t have anything to do for a while, let him fill in for you.

    BTW, you’ve probably been asked before, but are you related to that other hockey playing Berube (things over the ‘e’s)

    Posted by  on  02/15  at  03:11 PM

  15. "Either way.... we sent the HDD to a lab in New York with a clean room and for $2,000 and a weeks time we had our data back. “

    Hmm, did they use a scanning-tunneling microscope (STM)?  You can even get stuff that’s been deleted with one of those, but I would think that it would cost a lot more than $2000.  Write heads drift over time.  Each write leaves a narrow band, a few atoms wide that is not overwritten. The STM can read those few atoms.  Everything you write to a disk is recoverable, for a price, unless you use drastic means like EMP to erase it.

    Posted by  on  02/15  at  03:21 PM

  16. Michael!  You [unflattering adjective/noun combination removed]!  What if your University were to give you 500MB of storage that you could do anything you wanted with?  Well, guess what?  When you come to a suitable stopping point, copy your chapter into your Penn State Access Storage Space (PASS).  We provide free file transfer clients that allow you to do this securely.  Your PASS space is backed up as a matter of course and you can make sure you are the only one who can read it.  We call this “covering your PASS.”

    I missed the CCM game too on Sunday, so you are forgiven!  See you tonight at the Geriatric League game—Jim

    Posted by Jim Leous  on  02/15  at  03:49 PM

  17. I didn’t write this, but it seems appropriate to repeat.

    Abort, Retry, Ignore?
    With Apologies to Edgar Allen Poe……..

    Once upon a midnight dreary, fingers cramped, and vision bleary,
    Systems manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
    Longing for the warmth of bed sheets, still I sat there doing spreadsheets.
    Having reached the bottom line I took a floppy from the drawer.
    I then invoked the SAVE command and waited for the disk to store.
    Only this, and nothing more.

    Deep into the monitor peering, long I sat there wond’ring, fearing,
    Doubting, while the disk kept churning, turning yet to churn some more.
    But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token.
    “Save!” I said, “You cursed mother! Save my data from before!”
    One thing did the phosphors answer, only this and nothing more,
    Just “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

    Was this some occult illusion, some maniacal intrusion?
    These were choices undesired, ones I’d never faced before.
    Carefully I weighed the choices as the disk made impish noises.
    The cursor flashed, insistent waiting, baiting me to type some more.
    Clearly, I must press a key, choosing one and nothing more.
    From, “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

    With fingers pale and trembling, slowly toward the keyboard bending,
    Longing for a happy ending, hoping all would be restored,
    Praying for some guarantee, timidly, I pressed a key.
    But on the screen there still persisted words appearing as before.
    Ghastly grim they blinked and taunted, haunted, as my patience wore,
    Saying, “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

    I tried to catch the chips off guard, and pressed again, but twice as hard.
    I pleaded with the cursed machine: I begged and cried and then I swore.
    Now, in mighty desperation, trying random combinations,
    Still there came the incantation, just as senseless as before.
    Cursor blinking, angrily winking, blinking nonsense as before,
    Reading, “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

    There I sat, distraught, exhausted, by my own machine accosted.
    Getting up I turned away and paced across the office floor.
    And then I saw a dreadful sight: A lightning bolt cut through the night.
    A gasp of horror overtook me, shook me to the very core.
    The lighting zapped my previous data, lost and gone forevermore.
    Not even, “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

    To this day I do not know the place to which lost data go.
    What demonic netherworld us wrought where lost data will be stored,\
    Beyond the reach of mortal souls, beyond the ether, into black holes?
    But sure as there’s C, Pascal, Lotus, Ashton-Tate and more,
    You will one day be left to wonder, lost on some Plutonian shore,
    Pleading, “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”

    Posted by  on  02/15  at  05:47 PM

  18. I work for Big Blue, and after my latest PC meltdown/data loss nightmare, I have three words for yew:

    GET A MAC.

    I did.

    (is that five?)

    Posted by Beerzie Boy  on  02/15  at  06:34 PM

  19. Everyone else has missed this, it seems.  You were near a hockey rink, right?  The rink’s surface is ice, correct? Is it any wonder your laptop “froze?” And is it any wonder it then worked when you took it to the tech support department, undoubtedly a warmer space than the aforementioned hockey rink?

    Moral: Leave laptops at home in centrally-heated space.  Ideally, persuade cats to curl up around them.

    Posted by Linkmeister  on  02/15  at  07:46 PM

  20. Jim, I am indeed an [unflattering adjective/noun combination].  But even still, I’m working at Penn State for three and a half years and this is the first I hear about PASS?  What other secrets are you all keeping from me?  For example, where is the blue food?

    Looking over these comments, I suppose I should get a Mac.  (I love that phrase “Mac Evangelists,” Abby-- do they speak in tongues, or are those the Mac Pentecostals?) Here’s my worry, though.  I have about 150 MB of writing, class notes, pre-email correspondence, letters of rec, etc., all in WordPerfects 4 through 12.  I know that Word and WordPerfect have matured enough to be able to talk to one another, but in converting to Mac am I also consigning myself to converting old documents one by one for the rest of my life?  (When this blog crashed the first time, I noticed after we’d moved to a new host that all the odd characters-- like, for example, és-- had been converted to question marks.  So I diligently went back and cleaned up old posts, doing a week per day, until I got to March-- and the blog crashed again, this time terribly, on November 1.  Whereupon, when Kurt saved the whole thing and moved us to Expression Engine, I found that all the és and all the quotation marks had been converted to triple question marks.  I dread this kind of thing even more than the collected works of Billy Joel.)

    And Njorl, I’m not directly related to Craig “the Chief” Berube, but (a) there aren’t very many of us, so maybe he’s a sixth cousin, (b) he doesn’t use those fancy accent marks, and allows his name to be pronounced barooby, and (c) I believe he last played with the Philadelphia Phantoms, where the lockout isn’t an issue.

    Posted by Michael  on  02/15  at  08:04 PM

  21. But did your team win the game without you, therefore proving that it was the conniving goalie who “iced” your laptop?

    Posted by DocMara  on  02/15  at  08:35 PM

  22. Don’t know yet, DocMara!  Maybe I’ll find out tonight at the over-40 pickup game.

    Posted by Michael  on  02/15  at  08:55 PM

  23. My apologies for adding one more to the heap…

    BUT… its time to buy a MAC

    I finally bought an iBook this year (and I’m a grad student living on a stipend, so they are, in fact, affordable.)

    It has been the best technological decision I have made since deciding not to buy a Mini Disc player. 

    Apple’s software is so easy to use for all the things that academia will throw at you.

    Posted by  on  02/15  at  09:44 PM

  24. Well, Michael, what can I possibly add to the words of all these brilliant technolits, especially your Poe emulater friend—pure genius, that Tim!

    But I must thank you and your friendly commenters for helping me feel slighly less imbicelic when I can’t understand, or, muchless, communicate with my PC at home or work.  And I don’t come even close to putting out the volume of written work you writers do. 

    Thanks to all, I joined the world today!

    Posted by  on  02/15  at  10:11 PM

  25. Since I have a gmail account, I usually e-mail myself a draft of whatever I’m working on every night before I go to bed.  I have a filter set up so that it applies a label to everything that I send myself with an attachment so that I can clean house if that ever becomes necessary. 

    This plan relies heavily on the idea that Google is not actually an arm of the CIA.

    Posted by  on  02/15  at  11:48 PM

  26. sorry this is so off topic, but “life as we know it? 
    someone please enlighten.

    Posted by  on  02/16  at  01:03 AM

  27.  )pe created files on each platform and opened them on the other without a hitch. I was using Word on both machines, though, not WordPerfect. I’ve seen the weird symbols problem arise most often in email (apostrophes turn to some exotic elements that don’t even appear on a keyboard). Don’t know why that is. Also, some fonts and colors map slightly differently on each side (the Mac usually looks better), but unless you are doing graphic design, that shouldn’t be a problem.

    I have also found that Word, as well as other Microsoft products, can be prone to crashing. I’m not a big fan of their software ... way too many bells and whistles that they think are convenient, but that turn out to be unbelievable annoyances. And the onscreen help positively sucks.

    Posted by  on  02/16  at  01:05 AM

  28. There’s a perfect example of what can happen for no reason. I didn’t type “winkpe” but that’s what came up when I submitted my post. Computers! Argh!

    Posted by  on  02/16  at  01:07 AM

  29. With USBs dead, chances are that the PC card slot still works. Even slim laptops have PMCIA cards (PC cards). You can get a compact flash card (flash memory used in cameras and pdas) and a reader that plugs into a pmcia slot for about thirty bucks. Use it like a floppy drive.

    Even if your laptop was dead, most laptop hard drives will slip out if you loosen two screws. You can get a USB housing for a laptop for about fifteen bucks. You plug the drive into the housing, the housing into your desk top. Shazam! Access to your data. 

    I just thought someone should suggest solutions that don’t cost a grand a require a complete change of platform.

    I’m a writer, not a computer guy, so this isn’t exactly rocket surgery.

    Posted by Chris Moore  on  02/16  at  04:44 AM

  30. Michael - Forget getting a MAC.  At least get a better PC!  You use a GATEWAY computer?  Do you have a DELL at home?  Doesn’t PSU provide some sort of computer allowance?  Go Toshiba or (gasp!) overpriced IBM Thinkpad.  If you’re not willing to go MAC, at least dump the Gateway machine.  I’ve owned two laptops in my life; the first was back in the stone age when I was at Rutgers (hey, this is the 10 year B.Anniversary).  I replaced THAT laptop only 3 or so years ago when I was finishing at Penn State.  Both are Toshibas, and both have never given me a problem.  Now that I’ve said that, I expect my laptop to die by the end of the week.

    Honestly, glad you didn’t lose your work.  Now, FINISH the book!

    Posted by  on  02/16  at  09:37 AM

  31. Let me join the chorus:  BUY A MAC.  They’re so much more reliable!

    My next project is to find an acceptable substitute for Word, the only program to cause serious conflicts with my system software. 

    Your story reminded me of the macro virus I got while finishing the last chapter of my diss, which of course infected all of the chapters before I figured out what was going on.  I can remember vividly my mind racing wildly as I considered possible new careers.

    Posted by  on  02/16  at  09:53 AM

  32. My stomach hurts reading your post. Go to the store—even Target—and get a little tiny drive called either a Flash drive or a jump drive. They are as small as a pack of gum, can be attached to your keychain (your real keychain where you keep your keys, not some computer keychain), and cost about what you spend on coffee a week. 

    And get a Mac.  No viruses.  No problem moving from platform to platform.  No missed hockey games. The thrill of being in an embattled subculture.

    Posted by  on  02/16  at  01:03 PM

  33. Um, not to be too contrarian or anything…

    I’m a Mac guy. I have a G5 dual processor and a G3 blue and white at home, I useMacs exclusively at work except for web browser testing, and I have since SEs were the hot new thing. And yeah, Michael, sure, you should get an iBook or better. I’m thinking about a new one myself.

    But they’re not trouble-free. They are better built than a cheap Dell Centrino laptop, for sure, but they blow out ports just like any other machine, and I’ve heard lots of accounts from friends about bad hinges, bad power supplies, tweaky displays and the like.  It’s a choice between Wal*Mart and Starbucks: do you go with the big anonymous evil corporation or the smaller trendier evil corporation?

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  02/16  at  01:14 PM

  34. mac’s an “embattled subculture?” don’t you mean “cult?” i don’t preach to people to buy a pc or switch to open bsd.  seriously, as a guy who has owned both macs and pc’s, chris clarke nailed it:  neither one is trouble-free, and it’s a choice between two evils.  computers don’t define who we are any more than our cars or our clothes.  the “mac evangelists” would have you think otherwise.  you can avoid a lot of pc problems by switching your web browser to firefox.  mozilla even has a mail client, so you can avoid those “made for outlook” viruses. 

    the solution chris moore offered is good.  don’t spend a bunch of money on something that only puts off your problem.  all computers will die.  it’s part of their nature.  get a reliable, regular backup solution.  the jump drive or the compact flash card plus adapter option are really good and inexpensive.  the cf plus adapter option might be best because the pc card slot is not related to those pesky usb ports.

    Posted by  on  02/16  at  03:16 PM

  35. Michael,

    Mac Evangelist wasn’t my coinage.  So I can’t really take credit.  I should have jumped on the bandwagon a long time ago, and I do think that the Mac might be a better fit for Pentecostals too.  Certainly when I was in college (93-97) it was much easier to find Greek fonts for the Mac.  (I’m one of those dying conservatives.  I spent a lot of time on the 4th declension in Latin--or I would have if it weren’t pretty easy to master.  And I really do like T.S. Eliot a lot.  Ash Wednesday is one of my favorite poems.  I’m a terrible reactioanry.)

    In any case, Chris Clarke is right that Macs aren’t perfect, but as a faculty member, you would get a big educational discount and Apple gives educational customers a higher level of service.  If you buy the extra warranty, you’re covered for pretty much anything.

    Posted by  on  02/16  at  03:22 PM

  36. A reactionary who can’t even type.  Damn!

    Posted by  on  02/16  at  03:25 PM

  37. Yes, get a Mac. I’m an academic, too, and though I don’t have the Bérubé résumé, I sure didn’t have any problem converting a 500pp dissertation, thousands of pages of notes, a half-dozen article manuscripts, and, like, a billion other kinds of things (email messages, WWW bookmarks, home budgets, etc. etc.) from my old, loathed Acer PC to my PowerBook.

    A 15” PowerBook with a SuperDrive (http://www.apple.com/powerbook/index15.html) will do everything you ever need. And you can even go to an Apple Store for live, in-person help with converting files or whatever, if the PSU tech support wizards can’t help - or because you need to buy iPods for the sons. (There’re two such stores in PA: one in King of Prussia [wouldn’t it be dark inside him?] and one in Pittsburgh.)

    Posted by Christopher Tassava  on  02/16  at  11:29 PM

  38. Annie-- Life as We Know It is my book about Jamie, my second child, born in 1991 with Down syndrome.  DocMara, my A team lost Sunday night’s game 4-3, and as one of my teammates told me while we were lacing ‘em up on Tuesday night, “we could have used you.” Made me feel so rotten I went out and scored three-- before missing an empty net with 20 seconds left (!).  And Abby, it’s great to hear from a genuine reactionary and Eliot fan!  Glad there are still some of you left.  And yes, of course the fourth declension is easy enough, but in my experience it’s remembering the difference between the masculine and the neuter that gives people trouble.  Remember the reader who showed up last week and claimed that the dative singular of cornu was cornui?  The horror, the horror.

    Posted by Michael  on  02/17  at  10:25 AM

  39. TRUE story--i swear!

    Novelist pal of mine awoke one morning this past December to find his house on fire.

    he ran outside with his dog & his wallet.

    then, he ran BACK INSIDE THE TOTALLY ON FIRE TWO-STORY WOODEN HOUSE to go UPSTAIRS and GET the computer on which his nearly finished several hundred page novel was living...broke his damn foot, and was lucky that was all that happened.

    MICHAEL--do NOT let it come to this! multiple copies, in different formats & in at least TWO different physical locations. that’s what Librarian advises. i mean, how hard can it be to email copies of chapters every couple days or so to your wife’s account or something like that?!

    -L.

    Posted by Librarian  on  02/17  at  07:02 PM

  40. Michael,

    Although MS Word for the Mac is 100% file compatible with the Windows version (meaning one could email files back and forth without any converting necessary), I’m not so sure about Wordperfect files. Maybe Word can open them as-is.

    A long-operating company caleld Dataviz does make a “automatically convert any kind of PC document to any kind of Mac one and vice-versa” product called MacLinkPlus, which works like gangbusters.

    (And although iBooks start at $950 for education types, my favorite is that new 12-inch PowerBook, $1399. Only the best for you!)

    Posted by Lukas  on  02/21  at  03:05 PM

  41. much like fatal car accidents, alien abductions and sexually transmitted diseases, data loss is one of those things that you think only happens to other people. at least you’re able to retrieve your data.  i lost six months of music recordings once. i retrieved some data but much of it was corrupted (random bleeps clicks and stutters). i then, about two months later after restarting, lost everything again. my will to live was very faint.
    my recording computer now has three internal hard drives, one to record to and two for backing up and i also own two external hard drives for extra-extra back up. it seriously is a mental condition at this point.  i would rather buy more back up space than a decent microphone. in fact i’m going to back up this post right now in case it gets lost in the shuffle and i have to rewrite it. now that i think of it, it may be a good time just to back everything up, it has been about two hours since the last one.

    Posted by cereal breath  on  02/21  at  04:26 PM

  42. You can house your PC’s hard drive in an external drive enclosure and (probably) transfer everything off of it onto your desktop. Enclosures cost around 10 dollars. I would do this loooooong before paying, well, more than 10 dollars to have somebody try and recover the data.

    On an iBook, you can hold down the T key and the machine will act like an external FireWire drive - plug it in to a Mac desktop and copy your data over. This might work in some cases where the data is otherwise unavailable (busted display).

    I switched to PC a few years ago because I thought it would be fun. It was. I spent many hours playing with it and changing configurations and trying to make it do things. Now that I have actual work that I need to do I’ve gone back to Macintosh. It’s been years since I’ve lost anything (excepting the machine that was on the receiving end of a coffee spill).

    Posted by  on  02/21  at  04:58 PM

  43. Michael, you mentioned that you’ll have to email everything to yourself as attachments.  I’m not sure if you know about this, but you should download some kind of compression software, like WinRAR or WinZip.  With these, you can put lots of little files into one big file—to make it easier to move it around.  Basically you create a .zip file and drag anything you want into it.  The program compresses it, and then when you’ve sent it you can decompress it and get the little files back.  You can compress entire directories this way and maintain the folder structure.

    I’d recommend using WinRAR to create a set of just-under-500 MB files that contain all your data.  Then just send them, one by one, to your Penn State Access Storage Space.  Send one at a time and copy it off to your new computer (or backup place), then delete it from PASS and copy your next one.  Should save a lot of time of dealing with individual files.

    Posted by  on  02/21  at  11:46 PM

  44. I had to write and say thanks for sharing your near disaster with the blogosphere.  It’s because of your harrowing tale and the many comments by Mac-evangelists that I bought a 12-inch Powerbook today.  The grad student stipend won’t cover it without the monthly payment plan, but I felt it to be a necessary investment!  The sassy backpack/carrying case was also necessary, if I do say so myself!  smile

    Posted by Daisy  on  03/05  at  07:00 PM

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