I now own a 500GB external harddrive. Our other one was 50GB which we’d filled. I spent the evening dumping files and now have 20GB of free space on my computer.

It is still running sluggishly.

Before you suggest…. I’ve run anti-virus software, AdAware, defragged, restarted, checked on processes running, shut down all background programs and still, it is not happy.

I remember when I got my computer thinking that 40GB was a monstrous amount of space and way more than I could ever possibly need. Today, I had a program freeze up and decided to defrag the hard drive. The computer refused because I didn’t have enough space. I had less than 1GB left. I dumped a bunch of files and now I’ve got 5GB of space, so I’m doing a backup and then will dump all the photos, videos, and old issues of Shimmer off my computer. Hopefully then, I’ll be able to finish the project I’m working on..

I just lost the last half hour of recording. Computer froze and crashed. Not happy.

Well, a mere five hours later and I have my primary website back online. Now to tackle the other six…

My beloved folding keyboard, which I use with my palm pilot, died today. I clocked a lot of miles on it but it won’t talk to my palm anymore. Now, there is a chance that it’s actually the infrared sensor on my palm that’s kicked the bucket, but either way, I’m looking at replacing a piece of equipment. This isn’t just a geek toy, I use my Palm and keyboard all the time.

I’ve been trying to hold out replacing it until an ultramobile tablet computer became affordable, but I may start thinking about it harder now.

Any suggestions from the peanut gallery? What I want is a gadget that I can write on, by both typing and handwriting/grafiti, one that will let me use Vindigo, function as an ebook reader, and display the subway map. It needs to sync with my computer easily. In an ideal world, it would also have wifi and a camera built into it.

And light. My current combo weighs almost exactly a pound.

The room is expensive and then they also charge for wireless. Why can’t they pony up for a fast connection?

Otherwise, Austin seems fine. I’m enjoying meeting SFWA members with whom I’ve corresponded but not met.

Spending an hour after I get home from work to clean out a list of porn from my site is not my idea of a good time. It was code hijacking on an otherwise perfectly good plugin. The plugin is uninstalled. I’ve reinstalled Wordpress and am now going to bed.

You’ll have to wait one more day to hear about the boat and the harpy.

Edited to add: The compromised plug-in seemed to be PodPress.

I have four projects due all of which use the same program. So. You can imagine the utter joy I felt yesterday when one of the projects decided to freeze. When I tried to restart the program, it was corrupted. Curses.

And yet, no problem, because I have the disks so I just reinstalled it and voila! It was still corrupted. It was as if I had done nothing. Next, I searched the registry and cleaned out the remaining bits. Reinstall.

Corruption!

After arguing with it for awhile and getting exactly nowhere, I decided that, fine, I would just do a full system restore. I’d been meaning to do that anyway and this was as good a time as any. I backed up my documents. Uploaded my fiction, just in case, and did the restore. I love how zippy my computer is right after a system restore.

I was less excited this time about how my computer would no longer connect to wireless, but a mere two hours later, I’d managed to download all the MS patches that were required for it to function normally.

Another two hours went to restoring documents. Then came the program files. I was resolved to only install the things I actively use, which accounts for a surprising number of programs. Finally, only eight hours after I’d started, I had the system restored.

I opened the offending program. And it collapsed in exactly the same way as before. GAH! I had a clean install! Nothing would fix it, so I finally downloaded the newest version of the software. My bet is that some lovely little MS update patch conflicts now with my old version.

With that in mind, may I offer you a tragic news story, that Stephen Segal just shared.

A Canadian cruise ship struck submerged ice off Antarctica and began sinking, but all 154 passengers and crew, Americans and Britons among them, took to lifeboats and were plucked to safety by a passing cruise ship.

The stricken MS Explorer finally disappeared from view Friday evening, about 20 hours after the predawn accident near Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands, the Chilean navy said.

I wonder if they tried turning the boat off and back on again to see if restarting it helped.

Whew. Already I feel better. I just dropped my computer off with Karl Swan, who not only promised to have it back to me within 48 hours, but also pulled some files off for me right then. Though I’d done a backup on the 27th, I’d also done a significant amount of work between then and when the computer imploded on the 29th.

So, I now have the current draft of my novel, current drafts of the two short stories I had been working on, and the logo design that had just been approved when things went pfffht. Everything else, I have on the backup.

Such relief.

We decided to go with a system wipe and restore. He made me feel like I was not an idiot, which was nice. When I get my computer back, it will be clean and with my documents already loaded on. So, I will not have to continue going crazy trying to fix it.

So.

So. Today I decided to make one more effort to figure out what was going on with my registry because, you know, I’d really like to use my scanner, printer and webcam. I read several different websites and they all recommended deleting the upperfilters and lowerfilters for the afflicted devices. I carefully made a backup of the registry and followed the instructions.

Evidentally, in the deletion process, I also deleted some vital thing for my keyboard and mouse. They no longer work. This means that I can’t log into Windows and so can’t restore the registry.

I’d try booting from a system disc, but, alas, that would be in one of the boxes that is already in NYC waiting for us. I’m certain that there’s another way to get in but at this point I’m frankly afraid of screwing things up more. I’m seeking professional help and hopefully, it will happen in a more timely manner than the last place I went.

So…now my printer and my scanner won’t talk to my computer. I am annoyed. I have it narrowed down to something (probably) wrong with the BIOS but, lordy, I have no idea how to fix it except a system restore.

That would be fine, except that the program that I use to layout Shimmer is in one of the boxes coming from Iceland to NYC. You know, the ones we left behind because we thought we were going back? So, if I do a system restore, I can’t reload that program. Oh, I could download a trial version, but it’s only good for fifteen days. I could switch programs, but that means rebuilding all my templates. The timing on this is, shall we say, crappy.

Well, boys and girls. This would be what we call a corrupted server and this is what happens when you back up your website pages, but not the database. So now we know.