The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence

[sovay]

Happy Bloomsday! I have no computer.

There are a couple of reasons that yesterday was outright awful until the evening, when rushthatspeaks and I went to see Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) at the Harvard Film Archive (it is one of the best black-and-white films I have ever seen, meaning that it could not have been made in color; and the ghosts are uncanny, but Deborah Kerr is terrifying), but one of them was the way my laptop failed to boot for over an hour in the morning and only came back, slowly and waveringly, sometime after dark. This morning, it wouldn't come back at all.

I do not really feel like recounting the details of a day spent at the Apple Store, except that at one point I texted derspatchel, "I am the only person with a book in this entire store. Everyone else around me waits staring into their phones or the air. I'm reading ethnography from 1912, but I feel like I'm conducting it a hundred years later." I had thought the problem might be that one of the fans in the computer had died, leading to overheating, but when the utilikilt-wearing employee at the Genius Bar (whose logo is a sort of stylized Bohr model of the atom; I am amused that the universally recognized sign for genius is still something to do with nuclear physics) popped the back off, it transpired that my machine only has one fan, which was not in the specs. I may have to name it either George VI or Owen Pugh. In any case, there were tests run, the hard drive appeared to be fine, it was decided that the problem was software corruption and the machine was taken off into the back room to have its operating system razed and reinstalled.

The operation was a success and the patient died: the hard drive failed during reinstallation. The good news is, a replacement is actually covered by the insurance I bought three years ago August. (For once, paranoia rewards. I cannot, cannot afford to buy a new computer. I am not sure I could have afforded a new hard drive.) The bad news is, I am unlikely to get the machine back before Monday, and until such time I have really no access to my e-mail and no ability to do my job. I guess this month is my exercise in unplugged weekends. But at least I could write about the last one without resorting to pencil and paper. I just don't write that fast by hand.

Comments

[kenjari.livejournal.com]

Poor laptop. When you are financially situated to buy a new computer, I highly recommend finding someone affiliated with an academic institution, in order to buy on discount. (I'd offer to do that for you, but my current location makes that kind of cumbersome.) There's also the possibility of getting a refurbished machine - I got one back in 2003, and it ran beautifully for years - in fact, it still runs just fine, but it's slow for up to date software and such.
At least so much else seems to be going right lately?

[sovay]

There's also the possibility of getting a refurbished machine - I got one back in 2003, and it ran beautifully for years - in fact, it still runs just fine, but it's slow for up to date software and such.

I will keep this option in mind. I don't need the latest model. I'm not even sure I want it. I want a keyboard and a screen and the ability to communicate at a reasonable speed with the outside world, especially the part that employs me. I don't care that much about making videos.

At least so much else seems to be going right lately?

On the whole, it does seem to be.