A Year of HYPERLIVING: Computer Deadness: Maximum Sadness

Forecast for the Future

"Every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself. The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact that he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it's too late.

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not that far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding."

- Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Computer Deadness: Maximum Sadness

(Note: This is not my computer, though mine is indeed smashed)

Expect a little upcoming interruption in Hyperliving service: my dearly beloved computer died last night--I left the cord in a precarious position in the middle of a walkpath and it was tripped and my computer was yanked to the ground, smashing to its seeming death. It immediately shut off and now when I turn it on, it makes the "Apple sound" but the screen just turns gray and nothing happens. Sadness.

Ironically enough, I just last week bought a 320 GB external harddrive to back everything up, but hadn't yet done so. I said to myself just on Friday when I was riding my bike home that, "I really need to do that on Sunday". The depressing result of my delay is that I may have lost 68 GB of music with hundreds of carefully crafted playlists. Equally important is the loss of all of my precious photos, which carefully document my life from September 2006 to the present. Some of these were taken by others and which I can get back in various ways, but most I can't get back and the rest, about 1500 or so, were photos I took this year for Hyperliving and otherwise. Finally, though there is less of this, lost is all of my non-Internet saved writing... including about 15 fresh pages on Beck I wrote this spring (as well as all of the 150 b-sides/etc making up my mighty Becklog).

I feel pretty devasted right now because I've finally stored my entire life--especially the last year and a half--on that little silver rectangle and it seems like I might have just lost it all.

The short of it all is that I now am temporarily without computer, as my aging P4 Windows 2000 desktop just died last week as well (though not nearly as tragically). I am a finger-trigger away from buying a new one with money I truly do not have (Apple credit cards?) so maybe i'll have something in the next few days... but for the time being I am alone in the world without binary comfort.

I'll check in soon with the rest of what's going on in Hyperliving coming up, though sadly won't be able to post the rest of the photos from the past few days.