The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Last night my friend spent hours and hours helping me resurrect the data from my laptop. The root of the problem, fortunately, is not the hard drive so the files were all still there. We took it out of the laptop and attached it to a USB converter, which allowed us to plug it into his computer as an external drive so we could see all the files. I grabbed the most mission-critical ones and copied them to alternate media, but I'm still a little out of sorts without being able to run a few applications (e.g., the Palm Desktop, because though I do have a reasonably current export of the data it's not totally current, and anyway, I need the application to be able to parse the data that I do have). Still, if I wasn't reeling from the inadvertent 2am bedtime caused by all the geeking around, I might actually feel relieved...

We did in the course of all this nearly kill my iPod, however. I tried using it as a back-up drive - at 60 gigs it's bigger than my actual hard drive! - but there must be some technique for using it that way that we didn't know. Somehow the song database on it ended up getting rebuilt, and in the process it rolled all the backed-up non-music files into it. So to clean it up we took them all off, but then something weird happened and the iPod forgot that it had any songs on it at all. Fortunately something else weird happened and it mysteriously suddenly remembered, but we're not entirely sure what went on. And so much for using it as a back-up drive. But at least I have nice music to stress out to now.

By the way, this is the friend that I met on the plane back from a Huey Lewis and the News concert. Hence the logical conclusion that but for Huey Lewis I would still be in even deeper technological hell. Because it if had not been for Huey I would not have gone to Mississippi, and if I'd not gone to Mississippi I would not have met my friend on the plane coming back from it.

What is odd, however, is that the flight where we met was on Delta...