psep03 faces near-death experience

Just a day after its second birthday, psep03 came close to dying young.

I wrote my dad this afternoon and asked how much a CD burner would cost. And I requested a diagnosis of the peculiar noise coming from my laptop.

"The hard drive is next to dead - bad sector(s)," he said.

Yay, said Ariel, who was looking for a CD burner to save her files from just such a fate.

As this fate has become the laptop before. Last Christmas, Ariel's dad gave another hard drive a matter of minutes to live, leaving Ariel with the swift decision of just what was most precious to her -- old Russian Lit & Film papers, story ideas, digital pictures, MP3s.

Luckily, there was sufficient time at Christmas to save everything.

And, lucky for psep03, there was time today, also, to shove all the Word files onto floppies. Floppies! They only fit 1.4MG per disk! I filled seven disks with Word files. (And one disk with "Bushbuck," the single coolest computer game on the face of the earth, circa 1991.) From my recollection, the CDRWs we got for the massive Beacons held 740MG. Praise the Lord for my MP3 player that doubles as a jumpdrive -- I was able to fit all of my hundreds of pictures on there, and a few MP3s, too.

But it's still a strange feeling to know that you have a short time to salvage your best memories, your sweat and tears. Your resume. Your work.

This is just a grain of what all those down south have been feeling. I remember hearing an interview about a Tulane student who lost three years of art projects. That would be...that struck me more than nearly anything else I've heard so far.

And now, of course, that I've copied all these hundreds of files, the computer seems so calm. Watch it not die. I hope it doesn't -- it would be challenging to go back to communication exile.

(And speaking of the Beacon, students, I want details! How did it come out? Did it come out? What's in the news?)