when a hard disk dies...

it's odd what you want to recover most.

I should have known - I was in denial, for sure. Even during Lotusphere, there were some unexplained events with my laptop, but denial is a very powerful force. Since Lotusphere, with increasing frequency, my laptop would misbehave. An error on boot... Access Connections disappearing from the toolbar... But I circumvented each obstacle... If I can get by it, it can't be that serious, right?

Last Thursday, when IE suddenly refused to connect but Firefox was happy, I decided it was maybe time to heed Steve's advice and do a chkdsk, which of course involves a reboot. Blithely I tried it. Reboot, chkdsk successful, but as it launched, blue screen... Tried it all again, not a fluke. Tried it again in a different T60 shell, same thing. Dead disk.

Then the panic starts.

Source trees - ok on that count, submitted my code a few hours ago. Work mail - all on the server, no problem, can always make another replica. Presentations - ouch. But if I have to write them again, I still could. Personal email - now THAT is only on the machine as I so neatly remove it from the server... That's a real problem. My history is in my email - it's a journal of conversations, and I felt its loss deeply.

I actually felt kind of disoriented. It's probably pretty unhealthy for a laptop to be so much a part of one's comfort zone.

But there is a pretty happy ending. Someone was able to put it in a drive tray, and if you don't try to boot off of it, the data is accessible. My personal email has a new home on my home machine. My presentations have been preserved. A new disk is on its way from the mothership. All's right with the world again.

Album Craze

After seeing Pete's and Brian's album covers, my curiosity got the better of me...

Here's mine!



A Chestnut Mare... Ironic, as that song will always be close to my heart. It is my song, from long ago, but will always make me smile.

Change of Seasons

As soon as I returned from Lotusphere, I felt spring on its way. This contrasts sharply with the reality of New England winter, but I can't help it, I feel it. It didn't make sense to me until I realized why I was feeling the seasons were changing - Lotusphere is a season unto itself. When it's over, it must be the next season, which if you blur it with reality, the season after winter is of course spring....

You can start feeling Lotusphere in the air when the call for abstracts go out, but it doesn't truly arrive until you start getting notices for slides being due... Once the presentations start taking form, the season is in full swing... It continues til you arrive home from Orlando. November, December, January... Lotusphere Season.

And now it is Spring. No matter what the groundhog said today.