They say that everything happens in threes, so two weeks ago when my hard drive failed I suppose that I should have expected the rest. First let me back up several months to expose my inaction. I have several classmates who have the same model of MacBook as I do, and several of them suffered the pains of hard drive failures during the school year. Silently I said to myself, "That really stinks, but it won't happen to me." Ha! Famous last words. Despite the warnings of my classmates to back-up my hard drive, my frugality and stubbornness won out and I did not. So two weeks ago, yesterday (Saturday) I opened my MacBook, and without warning I got the dreaded grey screen with a flashing question mark (see image), indicating that the computer could not find the hard drive. Needless to say I was distraught, we lost all our photos from the last year and a half, plus a lot of other stuff. My fears were confirmed when we drove to the closest Apple Store (60 miles away) to take the computer in for repair (fortunately it was under warranty so the new hard drive did not cost us).
While we were away at the store the second time to pick up the computer a severe summer thunderstorm hit Sarasota, as tends to happen in Florida in the summer. During the course of the storm lightning struck our neighbors house, just 20 feet from the side of ours. The surge of electricity fried several of the electronic equipment in the house including our portable DVD player. Apparently our neighbor got it worse as he lost all the televisions and computers in his house.
As our time is drawing to a close here in Florida, we were rejoicing in the fact that we made it through the summer without experiencing any serious threats of hurricanes, but here again we were over confident. Little did we know that Friday night as we stayed up late watching the Olympics, tropical storm Fay was forming near Puerto Rico. We had been planning to leave here on Thursday and taking a nice trip up the east coast stopping in Savannah, Charleston, and Baltimore on our way back to Amherst. Now it seems that our plans may be accelerated. With most projections of Faye increasing in strength to a category 1 and possibly category 2 hurricane we are seriously considering taking off for Savannah early. Currently here in Sarasota we are under a Hurricane Watch, meaning that hurricane force winds are possible in the next 36 hours. So much for spending our last few days in Florida lounging in the sun on the beach. We are waiting to see what is going to happen and will probably make a decision on what to do late tonight or tomorrow morning. I tried creating a poll in blogger to see what everyone else thought we should do but it was not working, so you can respond in your comments...
What do you think we should do now that Sarasota is under a hurricane watch?
a) Cowboy up and ride it out and have a great story to tell,
b) Wait until Monday to see what Faye is doing before making the decision,
c) Don't risk it, pack up and leave in the morning.
We will probably be posting more soon so everyone knows what our plans are. I know that when my parents went through the hurricanes in 2004 I was always worried about them and if they were okay.
So the lesson of this post is: BACK UP YOUR HARD DRIVE (especially laptops, their HDs are particularly fragile).
1 comments:
I guess you decided to stay and ride it out, so I expect to see some interesting pictures when it is all over. I'm glad you stocked up on that Gatorade! :)
Post a Comment