sholio | Genficathon, White Lotus and things

sga_genficathon signups are open 'til Feb. 19! Signups, rules and prompt list HERE.

And, belatedly,

white_lotus is posting A:tLA stories/art/etc. for the Lunar New Year Exchange. I got an AWESOME story with accompanying, equally awesome art: The Same Process in Reverse (gen, Zuko & Iroh, post-series). It's a wonderful look at Zuko and Iroh after the series' end.

In considerably less awesome news, my 5-year-old iMac died.

The good thing is that I'd just backed up EVERYTHING last weekend, because it was acting noticeably flaky. The bad thing is that, because I am a total chowderhead, I hadn't backed up anything in the intervening week, which means that last night I was all of a sudden faced with the loss of a week's worth of writing, including a not-insignificant chunk of my original novel and a short story that I'd totally rewritten and some freelance stuff and AAARGH.

But things turned out okay in the end. Mostly.

After some trouble getting it started last weekend, the computer was working fine until Saturday, when it started hanging for no apparent reason -- acting like there was a big process running in the background, except nothing showed up in the process viewer. Finally it just hung and stuck that way, so I force-shut down and waited a bit and restarted.

The screen lit up and ... nothing. I couldn't get any farther than the blank gray screen that comes up at the very beginning of startup. I tried every trick I know -- zapping PRAM, booting in safe mode and command-line mode, unplugging and replugging everything. The point where my heart sunk to my toes was when I booted from the install CD to run Disk Repair and it couldn't find its hard drive. Like, at all.

NOOOOOOOO.

Husband is a computer programmer/electrical engineer, so I asked him to help me tear open the iMac and take out the hard drive. (Er, by "help" I actually mean "do 90% of the work while I hold things", but hey, he's the expert.) Getting into the guts of the iMacs is a real pain, a lot like tearing down a laptop except everything is behind the screen, so you have to rip that off to get into its guts. Anyway, we replaced the hard drive with another one that he had, put everything together, and I put in the install CD and ...

... nothing. No hard drive. WHAT.

But that was good news, actually, in a way! It meant that the computer was really, truly dead -- we checked the power supply and that was fine, so the most likely thing was a dead disk controller or something catastrophically wrong with the motherboard. But the HARD DRIVE, with all my data on it, was fine. Lovely Husband also has an internal-to-external drive case, where you can snap an internal drive into it and plug it in like an external drive, and YAY. All my files and email and things, still right where I left them!

So I spent last night and this morning transferring stuff to my laptop and getting my programs all running again. The laptop has never been my main machine; it was a present for myself a couple of years ago, to be used for travel and school, so there are a few things about it that aren't ideal now that it's suddenly been tapped into service as my sole computer -- like the 13-inch screen and the fact that I never managed to successfully clone my hard drive to it, so a lot of my programs don't have all their extensions and things. Still, I'm incredibly lucky to have it, and not only that, but it's faster and has a bigger hard drive than the iMac, so once I got it all cleaned up and my files moved in, I have way more space than I did before. It's almost like having a new computer, and I have all my FILES. And now I'm super-paranoid about backing up. I've actually been incredibly lucky, as much as I've relied on computers for the last decade, not have had a catastrophic crash before, and this actually did work out all right in the end, but wow, there's nothing like that moment of "Oh craaaap, I just lost things I can't replace" to spur a new era of obsessive backing up.