by My laptop, which has now performed quite a few Lazarus impersonations has it seems finally kicked the bucket with a irreparable hard disc failure.
I have back ups, all is not lost.
I have Backblaze (affiliate link).
I even have the capacity to plug the drives themselves in elsewhere with handy cords. I can access the primary drive for an inconsistent twenty seconds or so before it resets and windows helpfully asks if I want to format the drive in order to use it. I have grabbed a few important things off the drive that way just to tide me over until I download the rest from Backblaze.
Still I’m pretty crushed and demoralised by it all. Struggling to see a way in which I can purchase a worthwhile laptop pre-Europe. Loans are unlikely due to the instability of my income, hire is for chumps. I am going to have to sell something big to achieve this and I’m going to have to do so without my primary creative tool.
In the mean time N and I will share her desktop which is her primary photography processing tool. For reasons still unclear her desktop restarts between 2 and 12 times a day at random intervals and with no clear trigger, so this is not an ideal solution. Event logging has yielded no explanation for the restarts so far and we have tried a huge variety of fixes to no discernible effect.
Adding to my frustration NSW Ed got back to me today and, in direct contradiction to the first enrollment officer I spoke to, asked for scans of certified copies of my ID and university documents. The first enrollments officer said that scanned originals were clearly superior and the second ‘jobsworth’ grudgingly acknowledged that a scan of a certified photocopy is an uncertified digital document and therefore worthless but that’s what the system needs. Fortunately I have a fairly large collection of certified copies and was able to scan and send them today. But it means it is likely to be at least another week before I get any progress on permission to teach in NSW. Another week without earnings beyond the meager supplemental income my tutoring is bringing in.
Thanks to the computer troubles and playing primary carer while trying to polish off the final rough edges of the unpack as well as clean up some of the grime our two darlings spread everywhere they go I’ve had limited creative success today. I have managed to recover the progress I made on a perspective reference model for the castle card in Sketchup, which is a relief. But I haven’t even begun installing Sketchup, tablet drivers and Manga Studio on this comp.
Some good news arrived in the form of my key ring showing up in West End so we will soon have a second car key again.