sniffnoy | General notice: Computer is down again... and probably will be for like a week

TLDR: Computer has problems, not going to be able to get it repaired by Monday - at which point I am disappearing from Ann Arbor for spring break to go visit Heidi down in Rolla (who has been rather insistent I come visit her). Hence, no repairs till I return next Saturday.

ADDENDUM 2/27: Fuck, it looks like it really is kaput now. Fortunately I got most everything backed up. Well, guess I should try making a bootdisk and actually getting around to running fsck before doing anything else...

Long version: So today I wake up and turn on my computer. It posts, but then I just get a black screen with a blinking cursor. Well, I always get that for a bit before the Ubuntu startup screen, but it just continues. Power off, try again, grub screen comes up this time, try again same thing, same thing happens. No surprises there. OK. Boot into recovery mode. Now I can actually see the bootup process.

Well after a while I start getting screen after screen of hard drive errors. (Not like last time, though, where it couldn't even mount the thing.) Yes, even though Beagle Brain replaced my hard drive some months ago. Perhaps the problem is just a bit upstream from the hard drive? Perhaps I should just get a new computer entirely?

Well I go away for like half an hour (watching Dan play FF7 :P ) and when I come back, it has actually made it to the recovery mode screen, asking what I want to do next. Amazed it has made it that far, I elect to just resume a normal boot. More errors, but when I get back, the computer has successfully booted into text mode!

Login, ls. Everything's there, looks like. Try reading a few files, things don't seem corrupted. Evidently things aren't that bad... so why the hell not, I go ahead and type "startx". I get the login sound... and a mouse pointer... on a black screen. Damn. Ctrl+Alt+F2... well, what am I going to do in text mode anyway? Why not, let's check it out again; Alt+F1. But instead of the black screen with the mouse pointer, I see text mode again, producing a whole bunch of errors - of the same sort I originally saw when I started it up. And annoyingly if I hit Alt+F2, the errors just start popping up on that terminal instead.

Anyway I took it in to Beagle Brain and yeah, they are not getting it repaired by Monday. So I'm keeping it with me for now. Figure I'd best back stuff up in case this hard drive goes kaput too. (Bought a new USB stick while I was at Beagle Brain since my current one seems to have some problems with writing to it? I hope *that's* not a problem with the computer as well, though I don't see how it could be. I suppose I could also scp stuff to the school computers... except that those are being taken down for maintenance over the break.)

So I've shut the thing down and turned it on again ("sudo halt" is not exactly hard to get right even with a screen full of errors), dunno if it's booted yet. So what can I actually do in text mode? Well I can get work done, certainly, though TeXing will be a bit troublesome if I can't see the results. I guess I can try getting pine or something set up so I can use email? Web browsing, though... I mean, are there actually text-mode browsers that will be able to handle, say, Twitter? (Hm, maybe there are terminal-based Twitter clients? Twitter *is* essentially just text, after all.) Well, at least I've got a decent screen resolution... :P

So I'm guessing I'm going to have to be borrowing Heidi's or her housemates' computers for the week? :-/ Here in Truth House there are public computers I can use, but I don't expect that'll be the case down in Spotty Thorpe - a house of only 6 people probably doesn't have much need for a thing...

-Harry