EGAD

Venting

Grrr ... it sure has turned out to be one of those weeks!

Okay, first of all, New York was grand. There was much good conversation and good food and catching up with folks I see far too infrequently: especially my sister, and friends like Paul and Connor and Jess.

But now I'm back, and I seem to have brought back with me the latest respiratory virus being passed around in the Big City. I suppose I should just be thankful that I didn't bring back any bedbugs, 'cause the City has those as well of late. But I really, really didn't have time to be sick this week, since people are waiting on some hardware testing results that I'm working on, and it's exactly the sort of work that somehow takes forever when I'm fuzzy-headed.

Teaching while feeling like crud wasn't enormously fun, either; thankfully I had no interacting-with-others responsibilities yesterday, when I was feeling worst.

The real topper qualifies as completely freakish icing-on-the-cake coincidence -- the hard drive in my lab computer has died. Tentatively I think much of the data will be salvageable, and the important stuff is of course mostly backed up. It will be righteously annoying to pull all that stuff back together, though, so I'm left looking forward to a week or so of reinstallations and restoring things from backups and generally not having a workstation. And there's lots of little things that aren't backed up anywhere -- individually kind of trivial, but they would add up quickly to a lot of annoyance if I can't salvage the drive. E.g. recently added email addresses and bookmarks, some of my post-processing astrophotography, the spreadsheets my house uses to divvy up expenses.

So, wish me luck with that.