Anthropax's Old Blog

My laptop had been playing up when I was at Uni, crashing when I was on the internet (Firefox baby yeah!), and coming up with lovable little messages telling me to backup my hard-drive because it was about to fail, and other things. Naturally I ignored them. "Oh, I'll do it tomorrow, I have internety goodness to use now", and in the back of my mind, the thought "If I ignore them, they'll go away". So, when my laptop crashed, I was, needless to say, a little surprised. As luck would have it, I had popped around to Nicks, in order to work on my Study of Religion essay when the final crash happened. He, being a Linux geek, and having a computer with NO ICONS AT ALL on the desktop provided me with a disk that I could use to get work done on. And so, I became a non-windows user for the first time in my life. There were giddy highs with Ubuntu (being able to play Mah-Jong, and having Firefox as standard) as well as crashing lows (having to save everything on my memory stick, not being able to play any music due to the lack of a free disk drive, and my shiny Civ 4 disk being just a coaster), but I learnt that windows, while easily navigable was not necessarily the only OS. I pottered along using Ubuntu for a while, recognising some of it's good features, and frustraited by the lack of a free CD/DVD drive. In the end, I went to the PC World store in Hereford (my warrenty is still going strong), and asked them to fix it. They told me to put in a special disk, and rest the computer, assuring me that the saved files (photos of Hong Kong and other times, work files documenting A-levels and the start of University, my large music collection) would be fine and dandy. Alas, it was not to be. These disks did, truth be told, restore my computer to the state of the day I first started the little thing up. It also removed everything that I had put on the computer from then until now. Everything. Think of your computer, the one you are using now, and imagine everything that you had saved on it, removed, never to come back. You may well be shaking, weeping even, because yes, although you had backed up some things, large, large portions had simply been removed. I didn't weep, granted, but the feeling was similar. I had formed a bond with my computer, one where I had left my own, special imprint on its desktop. I had set up folders to hold my things in the way I wanted them, not all my documents in one uber folder as Microsoft would have it. I had lovingly moved my music into genre based groups, and had given the desktop a pleasing aestetic, unique to me. If I wasn't cold and dead inside, I could, dear reader, have wept. But there was a glimmer of hope, despite the Empire Strikes Back flavour of the post so far, The Jedi will Return. although scattered, parts of my computer had saved the epic, operatic destruction. Some of my photographs had found salvation in flickr, others were on disks, and others still were on my USB memory stick. documents had been backed up over the summer, and a quick archeological excavation may yeld treasures beyond my wildest dreams. Although much is lost, I will continue onwards and upwards, perhaps towards the ultimate assention to an Apple Mac in time. But for now, have a great festive time, whether Christmas, Winterval, Hanukkah, The Celebration of the birth of the Prophet Isa, Capitalism Day, Chrismukkah, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, Newtonmas or Kwanzza.