R.I.P. Dell Inspiron 1501

If any of you have been wondering where I've been for the last week or so, wonder no more. My laptop - the main computer I do most of my work on - took its last breathe and completely died on me. Blown video card from what I'm told. I've had the computer for 3-4 years now, and when I purchased it, it was a refurbished model to begin with. But, she's been a good computer and will always remain in my memory.

Luckily - and most importantly - the hard drive was able to be salvaged. Most of last week was spent getting my email and files back up and running on an old Compaq Presario R3000 that friends of mine gave me. The system works great for what I need to get done, and I am more than grateful for their generosity.

With that frustratingly horrible ordeal behind me, I'm off to try and have a productive week. The cover art for Endangered Memories is guaranteed to be finished by this Saturday. I've gotten a beta read of the book back from one of my biggest fans and received a slew of positive comments about it. I also finished reading the book to my wife and am now working through the final edits. I'll be spending most of the later half of the week and the weekend working on the formatting for the ebook version which I hope - and will be striving very hard - to release sometime late next week. Paperback will be released shortly thereafter.

Well, I have a load of work to do, so I'm off to do it. Just wanted to say I'm back and I hope to see you all on the other side of a productive and hopeful week.

Crash

I doubt there is anything more frustrating in this world then when a computer crashes and you lose everything. This happened to me on Wednesday afternoon, when I tried to repair the Windows installation that was on my laptop and something caused my computer to go haywire, forcing me to reformat the hard drive without being able to recover any of my files.

The silver lining is that I've always been a stickler for backing things up. I have jump drives, Zip disks, CDs and numerous backups on other computers for all of my writing, web design and marketing content, so when my computer crashed, it wasn't an utter loss. It did allow me to see the holes in my backup processes though. I lost the latest version of my web design software, some of my music, a vital image editing program, all because I didn't have them backed up. I also lost all of my internet bookmarks.

Luckily, I have a resourceful side that comes out during these times of distress. The music I lost is still on my MP3 player, so I think I can salvage that easily enough. There is a copy of the photo editing program on my wife's computer, so that's won't be too hard to restore onto mine. The web design software was graciously replaced by the company I purchased it from, once I explained my harrowing situation to them.

The only thing that I wasn't able to replace was the bookmarks. Over a year and a half of internet bookmarks ranging from marketing sites to book reviewers. For future reference, my wife pointed me to Google Bookmarks, which apparently can be opened on any computer - if you have a Google account - since the bookmarks are stored with Google.

This "little" computer mishap hasn't slowed down my progress on Black Earth: The Broken Daisy though. I wasn't about to let that happen. I am still on track to have the book released the beginning of Fall.

Photo Credit - mandyxclear