This I wasn't really expecting. I think my year-old laptop is dying. Earlier to-day it had froze awkwardly. Sometimes it would be saturated with IO and unresponsive and other times it would just be unresponsive and inactive. I thought this might have resulted from a recent kernel upgrade, or perhaps the proprietary ATI drivers I have been using for a couple of weeks. A couple minutes ago, my terminals received a message about an error with the journal and the file system going read-only. I rebooted (hard) and started receiving error messages regarding my ethernet card! After rebooting a couple times, I just got a generic boot error and a couple of beeps. I tried to boot from my USB key just now. While that didn't work, the hard drive did start booting successfully. It's now scanning the file system for errors it believes are present. BLEH!
Perhaps it is just overheating from being too busy to-day. I tried to build GNOME on it via jhbuild. Perhaps not a good idea. I think this is just wishful thinking, though. Thankfully, I have a small tablet PC I can use if it really does die. One problem with that is that it doesn't have a safe AC adapter here. That would be at my father's. I would mostly like to get my Trends in Distributed Systems assignment off of this machine before class tomorrow. Grr. I'm glad that I did do a relatively complete system back-up a couple months ago. The only real one I have anymore. It would still be very sad to lose the data since. Especially my photos!
My girlfriend and I have been discussing the dispensing of old possessions. She can do it much more readily than I. I see a lot of potential use or nostalgic memory in things, so I hoard them. She sees the burden of maintainership in them and freedom in independence from them. Data is ephemeral, too. I can't rely on its permanence a quarter as much as I can rely on my own, bodily faculties (and not even those, for too long). Hmm, I wonder how free I really am? I wonder whether I will really be any more free after I graduate.
Now to find a LiveCD that I might recover files off of that hard drive ...
Hrm. We should talk about guardianship vs. ownership sometime.
ReplyDeleteI think I feel a responsibility to appreciate my things, and I don't feel like they are appreciated if they go ignored and unused.
It's trite, but you're as free as you care to be.
After graduation, you can pick another thing to be responsible to (or not) and be selective in what sort and amount of duties that will involve.