http://norman.walsh.name/2006/12/18/backOnline 9 122 2006-12-18T10:03:23-05:00 $Date: 2006-12-18 12:14:37 -0500 (Mon, 18 Dec 2006) $ Norman Walsh 2006 Norman Walsh The thing about digital technology is, either it works or it doesn't. Leslie Lamport A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable. Epigraphs aside, the computer in question was my own laptop. Halfway through a telcon (one for which I was chair and scribe, of course, because Murphy has a perverse sense of humor), my laptop went “click”. Black screen: no input, no output. Not even over ssh, so it wasn't simply an X11 issue. Reboot, get back to where I was, “click”. Reboot…“click”. As it turns out, I'd run apt-get upgrade that morning and gotten a new kernel. So I spent half the day trying to back out the obviously busted upgrade. Long story short, it wasn't the upgrade. Confirmation came when it did exactly the same thing in the middle of restoring Windows (because IBM support doesn't support Linux). Twice. It also died running a memory test overnight. Curiously, it went through the IBM PC Doctor diagnostics without tripping. So while it's boxed up now and on its way to be repaired, I'm a little worried that they're going to have difficulty reproducing the problem. It took a day and a half, more or less, to get the environment on my desktop box back into workable shape and copy all the data off my laptop hard disk. I did bungle the DSPAM install though. As a result, I wound up with nearly 2,000 spam messages to sort through by hand. If you sent me mail in the last five to seven days, expected a timely reply, and haven't heard from me, you might want to try again. It's certainly possible that I dropped some mail on the floor. Now if I can just get used to the layout on this desktop keyboard…