Ugh.

I made myself a promise that one day, I would figure out how to sleep in a bed with someone else (say, a boyfriend) in it. Unfortunately, last night proved not to be that night. I don't know, quantitatively, how long I slept last night, but the qualitative answer is, "not enough."

I am also at Concordia a full hour and a half early for my class, having taken the same bus as Marc to his class, which is at 8:15. If I don't find an outlet for my computer at some point, this might get interesting. On the other hand, at least I have my computer with me.

Also in the good news department, the CSU (Concordia Student Union) is giving away free coffee, hot chocolate, and breakfast foods as a "back to school" thing, so now I have hot chocolate and fresh maroc oranges, which is always a good thing.

If only I weren't so tired...

For a computer, I'm ancient

Some people replace their computers every year, or every two years. I replace mine every 4-5 years, and I consider that to be a decent half-life for a computer.

My mom's had her present computer, a Mac Performa 5200, for almost 13 years. For all of that time, it's worked pretty well, if you ignore the fact that the screen went yellow a few years back. It was a good, reliable computer, chugging on for over a decade, which makes it positively ancient in PC terms. Mom doesn't really use it for much anymore, opting to use my previous computer, an iMac from the early 2000s. The only thing she really uses it for is finances.

Like I said, it's been a good, reliable computer for many years... until tonight. Tonight, when mom went to turn it on, instead of the happy mac symbol in the middle of the screen, there was a diskette with a blinking question mark inside it. Based on the manual (which my mom, amazingly, still has), this means that the computer is no longer recognizing the hard drive as a startup drive. The simple solution, according to the manual, is to find the companion CD that came with the computer, pop it in the drive, and run a disk repair. This would be fine except for the fact that, unlike the miraculously-found manual, the CD determined to be elusive. We can't find it anywhere.

I used all the tricks in my admittedly-limited books: hard-restarting, trying to restart with a variety of (non-startup) diskettes and CDs, pressing a number of key combinations on restart... all nada. Mom has given up and is trying to reconstruct the data on her newer computer; I'm just frustrated with the whole situation.

All told, 13-year-old functioning computers are the centenarians of the digital world, the great-great-grandfathers of the modern flat-panel, bluetooth-enabled, streaming-video behemoths. Let us bow our heads and give a moment of silence for the departed...