I'll Be Seeing Ya

I’ve been very busy doing all sorts of things recently, so not much blogging happening here! One of the reasons for this is that I managed to blow up both of our home computers. Deanna and Soren flew down to AZ a few weeks back and while they were gone I got the recording bug. I mostly do this in the basement but winter makes it impossible to hang out down there, so I decided to move my computer up to the living room. I got a table set up and hauled the gear (mixing board, microphones, pre amps, stands, guitars, effects boxes, computer monitor) and tried to get down to work. Then I turned on the computer and got nothing. Well, almost nothing: It powered up but did not boot and no amount of restarting (or unpluggint) did anything. So I chalked it up to it being an old machine (6 years old in the new year) and realized that I could probably harvest the hard drives and find a new more modern home for my music.

On Sunday night I decided I would try to move our main computer out of the office in to the living room to try recording on that machine. Once again I plugged in the computer and it did exactly the same thing: power sans boot or any action. I was crushed and now felt like I was in real peril, as every bit of writing and music (as well as pictures and financial info) was now unavailable and might not ever return. Deanna came home on Monday and we brought the computers to a friend, who managed to revive mine (the BIOS needed a reset) but not our main computer. We did harvest the hard drives but now need to find a new home for our data.

We only went a day or so without an internet connection (we got a laptop loaner) but it was plenty long for me. I am hooked on Facebook and enjoy the networking and nostalgia and pictures, but I mostly use the internet for research. If I want to know something I sit down here and let my fingers do the walking. The withdrawl from being able to do this whenever I wanted was painful. And we never did figure out why our computers blew up, though we did note that none of our first floor outlets are grounded (Our house is 99 years old). So last weekend we installed a GFC outlet in the office. We took out the old outlet and threaded the cable through and across the basement and hooked it up to the breaker box. We were very surprised at how easy it was and how good we felt doing something so important ourselves. We hope this new outlet, along with a strong surge protector, will keep us safely online for many years.