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Learning to Live Without a Computer

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I have written that being without a car in Los Angles is akin to an “existential crisis.” Well, now I have learned that going without one’s computer in contemporary American society is also such a “crisis.”

In a moment of delightful synchronicity, my computer crashed immediately after I had printed – and backed up – my final two papers for the Master’s part of my program in Mythological Studies. That is, it remained functional as long as I absolutely needed it in order to complete the work I had to get done.

As I was about to set out for a party, I realized I had printed out the directions to get there, but not the address of the celebration, so I attempted to turn my computer back on. It kept giving me a message that I needed to turn the computer on. I thought the problem was a temporary glitch, so tried to turn it on when I got up to the hotel in Carpinteria (where I stay during class sessions), but no luck.

I would not learn that my hard-drive had crashed until I took my laptop into the Apple Store on Thursday. I had to take it to another computer store to get it fixed – and where I could also rent a computer (the one from which I write this post).

It has been weird not having regular access to a computer. I didn’t realize (until I went without) how frequently I would check my e-mail – and the Internet. Not only that, I began to realize how much stuff I had stored on my laptop. While I had backed a lot of it up, I hadn’t backed up much in the past few weeks. And anyway, without a computer, I couldn’t read the disks where I had backed things up.

I didn’t have access to friends’ phone numbers, addresses, dates and times of upcoming events. Not only that I had saved notes, ideas for blog posts, ideas for screenplays, notes on movies – and, most importantly, notes for my Fantasy Epic on my hard drive. I realized that it was worth my while to pay to try to get them to restore my hard-drive. Now I need to learn how to better back things up. And to do so on a regular basis.

The one thing that struck me about the whole experience was how fortunate I was. It seemed that someone was looking out for me. As I noted above, my computer only crashed after I had printed out my papers. I had observed some strange things going on with my computer as I was finishing them up, things which seem to be related to the ultimate failure of the hard drive. And yet the computer held up long enough for me to complete the work I needed to finish. It seemed a good sign.

In her comment to my post on completing these papers, Sarah Rolph wrote “sorry to hear about your computer! At least it didn’t die before you printed your papers… perhaps the gods are telling you to take a celebratory break!” Maybe she’s right, maybe I needed to celebrate.

All I will say it is uncanny and makes me feel a little better about my place in the universe.

-Dan (AKA GayPatriotWest): GayPatriotWest@aol.com

Comments

  1. My laptop crashed once while I was typing up my solutions to a take-home test! But all my financial stuff, e-mail, calendar, and internship search stuff (I’m a college student) was all gone. Luckily, I had scrawled down my thoughts on the solution approach on some pieces of paper, though a very rough draft of it. But it was such a pain to walk through the snow to the computer lab on campus to start typing it all over again.

  2. You TOTALLY lucked out, finishing up your current job before the crash. Whew! I’m also in the same boat when the system’s down for any reason; no addresses, no phone numbers, manual bill payments, etc. “I’ll just go look that up … Oh, yeah.” To paraphrase an old saying, “Computers; you can’t live with ’em, and you can’t live without ’em.”

  4. In the future, when you are working on an important project, you might want to invest in an external hard drive as a back up and save your work to both locations. That way if either experiences hardware failure, your work will be secure.

    As a student, I learned early the dangers of not saving your work to multiple locations. I always back everything up: multiple laptops, jumps drives, external hard drives, cd/dvd burners, i’ve got it all.

    Use it. 🙂

  5. Backup is critical and no longer difficult to do. An external hard drive is great for a desktop PC or you can install a second HD in the PC case and arrange backup to that. Automate it so it’s done regularly. For a laptop, an external HD is not always convenient and you usually can’t install a second hard drive. Instead use a high capacity flash drive or if you have a PC Card slot use a 1 GB compactflash in an adapter and just leave it in all the time. Schedule regular backups to that.

    Most newer hard drives employ something called SMART which is supposed to help predict an imminent hard drive failure. There is software available to monitor the SMART status of your hard drive.

  8. Nowadays computer are like good health. Something we take for granted until its gone. Aside from the good advice about how to back up your information, add the old fashioned kind. Pen and paper, wouldn’t hurt to have some of that info on hard copy.
    God was smiling on you, hopefully you used some of the down time for some good Yamim Noraim contemplation as well.
    Have and easy fast, and Gmar Tov.

  9. #6: “I backup to to an external 250GB HD every week.”

    That’s probably OK for a complete system backup but a daily backup of documents, images, drawings, etc. is essential if you do a lot of critical work on a computer. For some, a weeks worth of work can be immense. If possible when you are working with important documents you should set up the program to do backups every 10 minutes or so preferably to a different drive.

  10. Heroic Computer Dies To Save World From Master’s ThesisProfessors lauded the laptop for taking the literary atrocity with it into oblivion..onion_embed{ background:rgb(256,256,256)!important;border:4px solid rgb(65,160,65);border-width:4px 0 1px 0;margin:10px 30px!important;padding:5px;overflow:hidden!important;zoom:1;}.onion_embed img{ border:0!important;}.onion_embed a{display:inline;}.onion_embed a.img{ float:left!important;margin:0 5px 0 0!important;width:66px;display:block;overflow:hidden!important;}.onion_embed a.img img{border:1px solid #222!important;width:64px;padding:0!important;;}.onion_embed h2{ line-height:2px;clear:none;margin:0!important;padding:0!important;}.onion_embed h3{ line-height:2px;margin:3px 0 0 0!important;padding:0!important;}.onion_embed h3 a{ color:rgb(0,51,102)!important;font:bold 16px/16px Arial,sans-serif!important;text-decoration:none!important;display:inline!important;float:none!important;text-transform:capitalize!important;}.onion_embed h3 a:hover{ text-decoration:underline!important;color:rgb(204,51,51)!important;}.onion_embed p{color:#000!important;font:normal 11px/11px arial,sans-serif!important;margin:2px 0 0 0!important;padding:0!important;}.onion_embed a{display:inline!important;float:none!important;}

  12. Regarding external drives: Mine crapped out after one year of use, the internal drive is still going strong after five years (yes, it’s positively ancient). So an external drive, in my experience at least, is no panacea.

  13. #12: “So an external drive, in my experience at least, is no panacea.”

    Of course you didn’t lose your data because it was still on the internal HD. That’s the point: the odds of BOTH HD’s dying at exactly the same time are vanishingly small. It’s not because the external HD is any less prone to failure. If you really have critical information, it should be regularly backed up to CD or DVD and stored off-premises.

  15. #13 Ian — October 1, 2006 @ 2:03 pm – October 1, 2006

    If you really have critical information, it should be regularly backed up to CD or DVD and stored off-premises.

    That’s pretty much what I do. DVD burners are really inexpensive nowadays. And, with incremental backups, one doesn’t have to back up the entire internal HD onto a DVD

    And, yes, I have an external HD for backup as well as an internal HD for primary access.