Computer's died; limited online access.

Bummin' the Mrs computer/net while she's out, so if anyone needs anything altogether important, I should still be able to check email regularly enough.

Frustrating computer death though.  Just this AM.  Working fine last night, nothing now.  Noticed some problematic startups last week, but tended to be overcome w/a simple power button hard reboot [you know, "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"]

I wonder now if the wonky problems I was having towards the end of last year - which seemed to be corrected by changing my OS to Ubuntu Linux - was just the beginning of whatever hardware issues I'm having now.  Or if maybe travelling from Japan to the US to Africa it got knocked around a bit too much?  And it's clearly a hardware issue - total black screen and the power light is on, but not the hard drive light, which means either it can't connect, or the hard drive itself is shot.

Most annoying is the reams of data I've lost.  Tons of archived video entertainment, all the music I downloaded [legally, for a change] when I was back in the US.  All my PT vids that I had backed up to use on my computer, comics, fights from the last couple months I hadn't watched yet, all my music that I had just recently reloaded to the laptop [in preparation to my move/packing things up/doing without] and whatever pictures I hadn't backed up online.  [Including, apparently, the pics I snapped of all the boxes and their contents I shipped from Japan, in case anything turned up missing.  Which still haven't shown up yet in Liberia.]  The hard copies of all those things somewhere in the magic of the postal system likewise between here and Japan and the US.  And, to top it off, given the dial-up level speeds here in Liberia, there's no way I can even begin to rebuild that archive from the paltry online backups I have.  Download times are just too slow, even if you ignore the fact that I don't have online backups for all that stuff.  Just the idea of having to download hundreds of gigs of info at 20kb/s...  just isn't gonna happen.

Gah.  Sigh.

Way frustrating, this technology stuff.