My laptop lives! Me ->

Fib has been resurrected. It took quite some time, but he's finally up and running again. So head on over to s page and tell him he's awesome. (Seriously. He's the only reason I have a working computer.) I think he considered this a matter of personal pride, as Fibonacci was very much kicking his ass at the beginning. (Fibonacci is my laptop, for those of you who don't already know. Though I was giving serious consideration to renaming him "Jerk".)

Evidence seems to point to a power surge frying my harddrives (both of them), so I'm now running Ubuntu Linux off my Firelite external drive. (Used a Mac to download Linux to replace an uncooperative Windows. [I understand why people hate Macs now. No right-click? No drag-and-drop? What the hell? To think I was once considering getting a Mac. *shudder*.] I could regale you all with the more technical details of mine and tem13ca's adventures in computer repair, but I doubt you would either a) care, or b) understand what I'm rambling on about. (If you do care, I can tell you. Just ask.)

Unfortunately this laptop revival came at a bit of a price. That price was my music files. All 40GB of them. I tried to move them to the Seagate external, but apparently all of them were corrupted and wouldn't transfer. No idea what happened there, as the Firelite was not connected to the laptop around the time of demise. So now I have to rebuild my music library. At least the public library here has a lot of the same music I have in my CD collection at home, and the downloaded stuff just has to be downloaded again (don't worry, it was legal). Still, this will take quite a bit of time.

And I have to rebuild all my Firefox bookmarks too. The webcomics list will take the longest. (No loss compared to tem13ca's list of somewhere around 160. And at least my laptop didn't explode.) I did save them to one of my flashdrives, but one day it decided to spontaneously erase all my saved files. I don't remember if I also saved them to the Seagate, but I don't think so. I'm lucky that I did a backup of all my files to the Seagate a few days before my laptop died, so all my other things should still be intact. The Inventor files and stories are really the only files I care about.

Of course, now that I'm running Linux, quite a few of the programs I was running before will probably have questionable or limited functionality, or not work at all. The media player thing that comes with Ubuntu is pissing me off. I want my Winamp back. I'm running Wine, which gives me some Windows programs, but I haven't had a chance to mess around much and find out the limitations. I should still be able to load photos, and GIMP works fine, so my backlog of art should be getting posted soon. (In a week or so; I'm buggering off to Bergen tomorrow to visit friends of the family for a few days. Will be back on Sunday.)

Completely unrelated, listen to the musical "Zombie Prom". It's not what you might think at first from the title. Think "Grease" but with zombies. It's hilarious.