Dilemma of the Day - Friday the 7th

Does our technology have a consciousness?  Can your computer react to your mood and current circumstances.  Do cell phones listen for the perfect time to drop your call?  I believe so.  I believe that my computer is among this "mind of its own" category as well.

This weekend I had the privilege of technical difficulties...my hard drive mysteriously stopped working.  Yeah, I'm sure.  It knew that I had begun using my laptop frequently in classes to take notes and to manage finances.  I had everything on this 100 gig hard drive.  Why did it decide to fry?  Because I was actually using it.

As my wife can attest to, I spent all of Friday in a panic and frantic state.  If I wasn't freaking out I was hitting the computer.  I had the wonderful experience of having my intelligence insulted by the technical support people.  To lessen the peril and gravity of this situation, I have two additional hard drives in external enclosures. In English for those who are not computer nerds, I carried around two old laptop hard drives that could plug into a computer through USB just like your jump drive.  On one I stored media files such as video clips and the like.  The other is solely dedicated to (here is the good news) backup.  I had backed my files up August 10th. 

So big deal, I lost almost a months worth of work.  In retrospect, the worst part was the fact that I now have a broken hard drive.  I solved the problem fairly easy as I grabbed the larger of my two extra drives and popped it in.  The lengthy install process was annoying but I'm used to it.  As a true blue computer nerd, I regularly format (or delete everything) my hard drive to maintain high performance.  I have now gradually established my computer again.

I have decided to change its usage mind you.  It formerly housed every file I have and served as my do it all machine.  I plan now on keeping the bare minimum on this machine for dual purposes.  First, the hard drive is smaller and slower.  Keeping less on it will help keep things fast.  Second, with a desktop at home with more than double the capacity of the now broken drive, I might as well keep the important stuff at home.

There is the dilemma of the day.