femminista: thoughts of a feminist rhetorician

So, "compma" is my attempt to merge "computer" and "karma;" I don't think it's working. It's true; Cat's karma is kicking her ass yet again. I've spent the last few weeks cleaning, scrubbing, trating, throwing away the entire contents of my pantry, freezing my yarn, examining every crevice in my home, and researching moths. Moths have invaded my home. And they seem to be trying to work the "possession being nine-tenths of the law" thing. Although it's been more like 999 of them, one of me. They're creepy and they're gross and I hope that they haven't ruined all of my clothing. Right now, I actually think that these are the brown moths that only eat "food" as opposed to animal fibers (which are also food for them, hence the quotes above). I'm almost afraid to say it. I mean, after all, the day after I raved about my laptop...

My hard drive is dead. Definitely and certainly without a doubt dead. It stopped working on me while I was trying to write a reading response and I was luckily able to get it to start up one more time and I got all of the teaching and class-taking files off of the hard drive. I used one of the iMacs at school to look up troubleshooting tips. Unfortunately, my jump drive wasn't all that large and I thought I'd be able to get it open again. No such luck. I was able to boot from my installation disk (which is still currently in my MacBook Pro since it won't even eject) and run several different diagnostics and try out all of the other methods given on the Apple website. Finally, when I tried to archive and install, the hard drive didn't even show up as one of my disk options. There was the cd icon and the network drive icon but the hard drive was no where to be seen. A quick trip to "system properties" and some other scanning thing that I don't remember, the bright red lettering screamed from the display: "that's right bitch--your hard drive is history." Now I have to send it to Apple. The folks here can't order a box to send it until Tuesday, so then they'll send it off on Wednesday and I might get it back the following week. I am not a happy kitty.

Now the question that I'd be asking if I were reading this instead of writing it is: if your laptop died, how are you writing this blog entry? Well, that's another fun story. So, I still have my Powerbook and I've been using that; but it's been slow and a bit difficult. Granted, I'm used to 2GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive not the 576mb of RAM and 80GB hard drive on the powerbook. Still, it seemed to be more difficult than it should be. I've been going through and repairing permissions and doing other fun maintenance items. Finally, I decided that the best plan would be to backup the hard drive, erase it and start fresh. Most of this content should have been on my MacBookPro and therefore should also be on my external back up drive, but I don't want to take any chances. So, I've spent the entire evening trying to get this external hard drive to connect to my computer and then allow me to backup the entire contents of my powerbook's hard drive. It seems that the difficulty is that there is some sort of fatal error on this laptop's hard drive as well. I've tried to repair it without luck. The error wouldn't let me back up the whole system or create a disk image to save the information on my hard drive, so (and if that little click is what I think it is)I have downloaded to my backup drive the major folders on the drive and hopefully the important info will be there. Now I'm going to erase and reinstall. I have my fingers crossed and, well, if I don't post here in the next day or so, that means I failed.

Fingers crossed, brow furrowed, lips pressed together in rapt anticipation, I leave you to your web frolicking.