We're Back

We're back from our European vacation. It was awesome, and I'll post pics and tell you all about it in another post, but first I want to share this bit of bad timing with with you.

We got back into town late Wednesday night. I turn on the computer to order pizza as it is late, and there is no food, and we are hungry. The computer turns on, I open up a browser, and it promptly locks up. I can't unlock it; I turn the computer off. Husband turns on his laptop and orders pizza. We try turning on the computer again; it won't boot up. We restart it--nothing. We try some more. Two hours later and several phone calls later, we have given up on eating pizza as the pizza is guy is new, lost, and doesn't have a map. Our apartment is not hard to find. The pizza place apologizes a bunch and says they're mailing us a free-pizza coupon. We eat ice cream (the only thing in our freezer/fridge), watch Futurama on Husband's computer, and go to bed. In the morning, I turn on the computer again, nothing, NOTHING. Husband uses a boot disk, gets it to run and discovers that the primary hard drive has crashed and is no more. I backed up everything to the secondary drive in January the last time my computer crashed, and while I did back up my dissertation and conference paper to a jump drive before we left, I didn't back up the other data. So I have lost everything I've done since January that is not dissertation related. The good news is that I've only been working on my diss, the conference paper, and my CV, so I have lost very little. The bad news is I dumped a year's worth of photos from my camera the day before we left. Now all gone. I'm sure I've lost other data too; I just don't remember what else I've worked on yet.

Yesterday and today, we looked at laptops and desktops online. We were planning on buying me a new computer after I defend (now in August--at a committee member's request) both as a reward and because this one was at the end of it's lifespan, but since this one up and died, we bought a new one today. It will arrive next week. (I'm using husband's laptop right now, and will use it and my office computer for the diss for now). It is a very good computer, one that will run Skyrim, will be compatible with top of the line games for a while, is upgradable, and has a touch screen. Skyrim and a computer that will run it was going to be my dissertation present, so I'm just getting the computer part 2 months early I guess. I'm naming it Doctor Computer.

I feel very conflicted about this because computers are expensive, and we're buying it after just having an expensive vacation, and I wasn't prepared to come home and make this decision. But at the same time, awesome new computer!

Edit: I changed the title to this post as I realized Crash is an alarming title if everyone knows you were on a plane recently.