Computer is back

I got my desk top back from apple this week. I also got the internal hard drive. I am going to get to take that to a data recovery services. Fortunately there are some in town. It will cost some money, but now that I have a working desktop computer, I'm not in much of a hurry. Whatever is still on there isn't going anywhere. I probably need to up my RAM. Not sure if that will actually ever happen.

Miss me?

Here are some observations I've made on the computer and data recovery issue.

1. This week I went to the funeral for the husband of one of my students. He was 32 and died from a heart attack. He was a great guy I didn't know well enough. He had a two year old and his wife is due with the second child in Sept. My data loss was instantly put in perspective, and it is effectively nothing. For those of you who do, prayer is appreciated.

2. While getting the machine set up again (installing dropbox, firefox, accessing websites and getting into my accounts, moving what data I have back onto the machine, etc.) I was reminded of all the stuff I have lost. It's a bunch.

3. There is something remarkably cathartic about having a completely empty machine. Much of what was on the old hard drive was junk I had collected over the years. I didn't delete it because I had no need to. I had a terabyte hard drive and I was only using about 250 gb. So much of it was pointless, meaningless junk I had no need (or even real desire) for. Much of it will not be missed. In many cases, I am glad it is gone.

4. I still want the photos and videos. There are numerous photos from Jojo's first month or two I don't have copies of other than on that hard drive. As useless and worthless so much of the information on that hard drive is, the only thing I really want is those photos, and I am willing to spent money and save useless crap to get them back.