Ah, now some trauma to add to the drama.
My iBook bit the dust on Friday, right before Lunar New Year. I just went into the Apple repair center, where my favorite portable tech in the world took apart my little guy before my eyes, extracted the hard disk, hooked it up to the diagnostic machine, and regretted informing me that it was D.O.A.
Sometimes, said he, you get another crack at it, like maybe he can get the disk to spin up one last time and liberate the data. But that's not likely to happen, and I'm probably going to be left to explore expensive disk recovery options in Yongsan. In the meantime, I'm going to replace my 40 gigger with 80, and upgrade to 1 gig of RAM so that I can get Tiger running (which I didn't have before because of memory limitations). He's going to give me that for free.
So I'm going to get a faster, meaner, clean machine - but without my data, which is floating in the aether where dead digital data goes. Major snippets from Chapter 3 of the book were/are there, which I was/am going to weave together and publish over the weekend break. I'd have been 3/4 done with the book, with some smaller snippets from Chapter 4 already floating around that same ether. A major section about Ilsan, which I considered fairly finished, may or may not have been saved in my backup of around 2 weeks ago on an external hard disk and to my iPod.
I don't think I lost any email in theory, between Gmail and Hotmail checking my POP accounts, but there's lotsa little stuff that I think I lost. I like to publish online, partially to get feedback, but partially in case of stuff just like this happening. So all my posts are online and retrievable back to Ecto, the blogging program I use. There are several mammoth tracts of writing there that I didn't publish, though, since they're not finished. I think those tracts will go wherever the fate of my hard disk takes me. Ouch.
I will survive. But this sucks royally.
Podcasts will be a little delayed until around this weekend. I hope (I don't think so, though) that I didn't lose the recent interview with my journalist friend, who gave a stellar podcast full of insider info about journalism in Korea (as a former editor for a major daily here in Seoul) and even the Hwang Woo Suk scandal, from someone who knows.
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!