Friday night, my laptop ("gangrel") refused to come back on from a suspend. It's in a shop, now, in the hands of people who weren't even fazed when I explained that yes, it was a dual-boot system that defaults to Red Hat Linux. I'm certain that it's a hardware issue, not a kernel issue, since I removed the battery and the power cable, to ensure that the system went completely zero-power. So I'm equally certain that all my data will survive the ordeal. In the meantime, I can no longer take my work with me to a nice café, away from the distractions of my apartment.
Fortunately, I was in the habit of making semi-regular backups of the data to my desktop (nothing fancy, just rsync). So I spent most of yesterday downloading and installing StarOffice on my Windoze "game" machine, malkavian. My desktop Linux system ("tremere") is what I use for almost everything at home (e-mail, coding, builds for CPAN release, etc.), but as a 233MHz Pentium I, the CPU graph flickers just from typing text in XEmacs. I shudder to think what StarOffice 5.2 would do to it. Anyway, I've been neglecting the Windoze box as I focus on writing, so this will let me continue to work (if the laptop takes more than a day or two) while keeping malkavian from feeling unloved.
I've also considered taking this as a Grand Cosmic Hint that maybe I'm working too hard, and should instead take the day or three this offers and either do some work on my hobby (painting miniatures), or do a MakeMaker-writeup that I've been toying around with over on perlmonks.org. The part that really bites is being bound to the desktop, again. I'd grown very fond of the freedom that the new (well, new since November) laptop gave me.
And I'm none too happy at the thought of a repair bill, either. Dell isn't too interested in helping me, because I bought the machine (albeit new) from a third party.
--rjray
