Entries this day: computer_update

computer update

9:10pm Sunday 04 June 2006

Hello from an old friend's old computer, with a Japanese keyboard, sorta making my head crazy with craziness, but....

It's a (beautiful) Mac, and I just created my own user account on here and am writing my first welcome back to emacs style journal entry, though I don't have my old .emacs file set up yet, so I have to type all these pesky HTML tags by hand...

In short, this is Hitomi's PC, which she offered to loan me, knowing how much I want to unixly (securely) connect to the backend of my website.

But not only that; she let me put my hard drive's data on here!

Went to the Apple Store in Ginza where the guy took my hard drive out of my machine and put it in a bag. Hitomi had just had some HD issues, so she already had a new HD and a HD to USB adapter to transfer the data from her old drive to new drive in her machine.

Went to Starbucks to do the data transfer (though the HDs are physically the exact same size; I don't know why the guy didn't just put mine in Hitomi's machine as originally requested), found a table, removed her old HD from the adapter, plugged in the adapter to the wall outlet, plugged in my HD to the adapater and

oops

Little glow of burning out a component in the adapter.

Shit.

Well, no use being upset, though Hitomi was quite upset. We tested it with her old HD and it worked, though this time were careful to plug the drive into the USB adapter before plugging the adapter into the wall.

Worked no problem.

(I was quite surprised the adapter worked after that little glowout.)

Tried again with my drive. Nothing. Specifically, no vibration of platters spinning up, and no icons appearing on her desktop.

Damn.

I told her it was basically okay; the data is 99.9% certainly okay; explained about read-write head being parked while the drive is off (I used the description "sleeping in bed" instead of "parked") and assured her that it was all quite likely recoverable. Couple hundred dollars should do it.

She offered to take care of that (big blessing!) and still loaned me her computer, and I loaned her mine with broken screen and broken HD. What a great trade!

Next steps:

1. * Recreate PGP key to get secure access to my site.

2. * Remember (reset) my plain-old password so I can get to my site to install the public version of that key.

3. * Set up screen and .agent here for supa-easy access.

4. Recreate .emacs file here for easy journal writing

5. Download

   1. * Firefox
   2. * Emacs for OS X
   3. * Skype
   4. other things as I think of them.
      1. * Growl