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Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Last Night a Laptop Saved My Life (A Small Hiatus)

So as I mentioned at the end of yesterday's post, my laptop, Vera, died.

Well, she didn't die, exactly.  She fell into shadow.  There were orcs chasing us, and Vera could tell there was a big problem happening on her hard drive.  In her best Gandalf impression she looked at me, and even Uberdude (who is a whiz with computers) and with greasy strings of hair framing her lappie face, she said,  "A common OS error.  A demon of the ancient world. This foe is beyond any of you.  Run!"

But like fools, we tried to stay and fight the problems as they arose. We thought Vera meant run to try to fix her, but what she really meant was run TO THE APPLE STORE!

[For maximum enjoyment of today's post, please hit play on the video below and enjoy your daily dose of Writing About Writing with background music.]


Vera turned to the other computers in the house.  The Brain's CPU, Uberdude's laptop, my iPad but looked at my laptop in particular.  "You must lead him on, Airgone.  (Come to think of it, I think she said Mac Air is gone in reference to herself....maybe.)  "The muse is near. You must lead him.  He must not stop writing."

We started to make headway on the problem using the online suggestions.  There seemed to be options related to reinstalling the OS.   We saved pictures and documents, and thought we were reformatting the drive.  Things were going as well as could be expected.  Little problems were falling one by one, and it looked like we might make it.

But the demon was still behind us, tracking our motion.  No matter how many little issues we dealt with like proper back ups and saving all the Writing About Writing Facebook page images, the bigger issue remained, growing worse with every time we tried to reboot.

And Vera/Gandalf was right.  This foe was beyond even Uberdude.  The OS encountered an error while uploading, and erased options from the files itself.  Suddenly there was no recognizable HD to reformat.  Even the apple logo had turned into just a folder with a question mark in it.  All was lost.

Vera turned to face the demon as we ran on.  I looked back, but Uberdude pulled me onward.  "We can't help her," he said.  "It's just going to have to go to the Genius Bar."

"Noooooooooooo!" I screamed, reaching impotently towards the Lion OX bar.

Vera faced the demon, her face etched with fatalistic determination. "YOU SHALL NOT PASS...safe mode!" she cried.

Then as the demon tried to destroy the hard drives, Vera erased them--along with herself--to stop it. She took it down with her. Not the physical body but her soul, and the essence all that she ever was, and fell into the abyss with the problem that caused her.

She turned one last time as her grasp on this world faded and the Apple logo faded into a question mark. She looked at me and Uberdude.  "Fly you fools.......to the Emeryville Bay Street Apple Retail Outlet."

(Hopefully you're around 4:45 in that Youtube track about now....)

Sadly, now that Vera has fallen into shadow, I lack a functioning laptop.  I can, and will, still do my writing, but I lack mobility--which means not only writing, but uploading entries from anywhere with wifi just became impossible.  I can still work off my desktop, but it has certain limits.  Plus most of the articles I had half written were on Vera.  So W.A.W. is probably on a partial/functional hiatus for at LEAST a day or two while I try to fix this. The convenience of writing on the BART or between classes added a lot to my productivity--enough that I didn't realize it until it was gone.

I hope to have a minimal disruption, but you can probably expect that we won't be back up and running tomorrow, but I'll get something up by Friday at the latest.  After that, things might get tricksy with the update schedule until/unless I get a laptop again.

Hopefully at the end of all this, it becomes Vera the White (instead of Vera the White Screen of Death) but I don't know if she'll be coming back from the dead or not.


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