miracle - a - day

At first I thought the theme of last week was "catastrophe a day." Besides Monday and Tuesday's heating and flooding issues, on Wednesday evening I turned on my laptop only to be confronted with the infamous Blue Screen of Death. And how long had it been since I backed up my data? Much, much too long. I was not a very happy camper at all. After attempting various permutations of booting and rebooting, IBM tech support was encouraging me to reimage, but I wasn't ready to give up on my stuff yet.

It was a damn good thing I didn't, because my data ended up being retrievable. In short, my advisor's former advisor's son (follow that?) happens to be a genius, and also, super, super nice. So nevermind the fact that he was in the middle of finals -- he still took a few hours to check it out, run some diagnostics to check the hard drive (it was okay) and hook it up to his terrabyte o' HD-space-having water-cooled (yes, water cooled) computer, where my data could be safely backed up to DVDs. I also learned more about computers from the experience, because he explains stuff damn well. It was great. I am happy, and indebted.

Also, props to B for better phone support than IBM (IBM is not so much fun to gossip about college people with, too.)

Smaller props to Z for other helpful suggestions. Smaller, because he started off by telling me how I should own a Mac. (That helps! Thanks!)

And so with this I decided that rather than "catastrophe per day", my week's theme was "catastrophe per day, followed by rapid, miraculous resolution of said catastrophe." Holiday miracles, indeed.

(OK, Thursday's "catastrophe" -- a lab-related issue sort of pivotal to my thesis project, which I've been working on for the past two weeks (sigh) -- is yet to be resolved, but I'm working on it. In fact, my timer just went off, so I'm literally going back to work on it...party talk later.)