Technology issues redux

While the ladies of the household have been loitering by a lake in Minnesota, it's been a trying day here on the homefront for Maddie and me, dealing with various technological issues. (For those who are interested, I've taken advantage of my unlimited posting on Flickr to update and expand some earlier photos. So go back to May or so and check out the Cloud Peak and Cascades photos.)

First, when I woke up at 9:00 (really woke up again after my inital awakening at 6:30 AM - no kid so I can go back to sleep! whoo hoo!), I thought that it seemed a bit warm. Turns out that the compressor of our AC wasn't turning. We've had this problem before and had to call a repairman to come fix it, but my hope was that the AC may have been overworked by the heat wave that we've experienced lately. So I crossed my fingers, turned off the AC, and went grocery shopping. When I turned it back on after my return, it worked so now I'm crossing my fingers that we'll get through the summer and can worry about the AC when next summer rolls around.

Then I started getting the blue screen of death on my laptop. My laptop has been running slowly for a while, so I figured that I should just reinstall Windows. But before doing so and reformatting the hard drive, I wanted to get the stuff off the laptop's hard drive. Couldn't boot into Windows at all, so I used a trick involving a Linux boot disk to see if I could recover the data on the laptop before reformatting it. Eventually, I couldn't access the hard drive at all. Instead, I started getting a clicking sound which a Google search and our family tech guy in PA confirmed was the click of death indicating that my hard drive was fried. Result is that I've completely lost everything on that hard drive and have ordered a new one. Luckily, I didn't store much on that computer (yikes if I'd lost all the baby photos!), but I currently backing up all of the stuff from our desktop onto CDs.

A boring post, I'll admit. But I would also urge everyone to back up their stuff before their hard drive crashes. This is the second hard drive issue we've encountered over the last 6 months, and while we've been lucky not to lose anything, we're pushing it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But we've managed to escape unscathed. Still, I'm not going to push my luck any further.

Now, can I find a picture to sate those looking for kid-related material? Hmmmm... in honor of Green Lake, MN, we have: