Chatimah Tovah
... is the official greeting for Yom Kippur - it basically means "May you be sealed [in the Book of Life] for a happy year"(Technically, of course, I'm not supposed to be online tonight because of the holiday, but I'm still working on completely reinstalling everything on my computer after the big crash two weeks ago.)
The big crash happened, strangely enough, while I was at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for a conference with a bunch of supercomputing geeks. It's a really cool lab (if you're a science geek) -- they do all kinds of amazing research. They took us on a tour of the site where the Spallation Neutron Source is being built. They explained it to us, but I couldn't possibly explain it here... I'm not a scientist! Read their website. If you look at the picture, under the word "Linac" in the top center is a water tower. That's where they took us to look over the site. It's HUGE.
Anyway. That fateful afternoon, I got a weird error message. Apparently my Windows XP decided enough was enough (this laptop is 3 years old, after all...) and died. Boom. [when my brother looked it up, he found that it was a common problem in 2002, which is when I got my machine.] The wonderful IT people at Oak Ridge gave me a Windows install disk and tried to help me with a parallel install, but that didn't work. (must remember to send them a thank you note!) To make a long story short, I paid Dell $99 to help me -- not under warranty any more -- and they did NOTHING! ZIP! SQUAT! (Note to self: BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP!) Eventually, I figured out that my stuff was still there (phew!), and my office sysadmin figured out how to burn it off to disk(s) - 5 of them in all. After a tedious reinstall, I now have a working laptop again! :)
What does all of this have to do with the High Holidays? Well, I'm truly thankful for the assistance of my friends and family: Jae, who suggested Knoppix, and Jeff, who burned me the CD, and Mohamed, who saved my stuff!!! I hope to be able to do something nice to repay them in the coming year.
And to the rest of you, if I have offended you or otherwise caused you harm in the past year (intentionally or unintentionally), I apologize. I wish us all a year of peace, health and happiness.
The big crash happened, strangely enough, while I was at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for a conference with a bunch of supercomputing geeks. It's a really cool lab (if you're a science geek) -- they do all kinds of amazing research. They took us on a tour of the site where the Spallation Neutron Source is being built. They explained it to us, but I couldn't possibly explain it here... I'm not a scientist! Read their website. If you look at the picture, under the word "Linac" in the top center is a water tower. That's where they took us to look over the site. It's HUGE.
Anyway. That fateful afternoon, I got a weird error message. Apparently my Windows XP decided enough was enough (this laptop is 3 years old, after all...) and died. Boom. [when my brother looked it up, he found that it was a common problem in 2002, which is when I got my machine.] The wonderful IT people at Oak Ridge gave me a Windows install disk and tried to help me with a parallel install, but that didn't work. (must remember to send them a thank you note!) To make a long story short, I paid Dell $99 to help me -- not under warranty any more -- and they did NOTHING! ZIP! SQUAT! (Note to self: BACKUP! BACKUP! BACKUP!) Eventually, I figured out that my stuff was still there (phew!), and my office sysadmin figured out how to burn it off to disk(s) - 5 of them in all. After a tedious reinstall, I now have a working laptop again! :)
What does all of this have to do with the High Holidays? Well, I'm truly thankful for the assistance of my friends and family: Jae, who suggested Knoppix, and Jeff, who burned me the CD, and Mohamed, who saved my stuff!!! I hope to be able to do something nice to repay them in the coming year.
And to the rest of you, if I have offended you or otherwise caused you harm in the past year (intentionally or unintentionally), I apologize. I wish us all a year of peace, health and happiness.
Comments
I see you've figured out how to change the pesky time zone. I know your favorite niece is in PDT (or is it PST?) but that doesn't mean your blog time has to reflect it.