Peggy's Computer Saga  

July 2010

THANK YOU to ISI Santa Cruz supporter Yanmin Tao and Hewlett Packard for donation of one, lovely hardworking laptop computer to ISI Santa Cruz ministry!!

I was waiting for the right time to spend a couple of days to program the new computer. (I had unwrapped it and charged up the battery, looking for a 2-day window to program it) Then my old laptop's hard drive died, for the 4th time since October. The time was NOW....
So I programmed it. A New Life, a new memory hard drive. I can try to salvage the old hard drive, for a mere $1,600, maybe able to recover old data they say, at a super high-tech lab hidden in a secret, high-security Marin County laboratory somewhere.
ehhhhh, hmmmm... so I decided to just try to salvage my data on my own, best I could.

Thank you God for CLOUD COMPUTING!!!  Whatever info was already uploaded to websites was SAFE!  whatever was not, is gone.

except for what I could save from my Palm Pilot. which, a few days before my first hard drive failure, also failed, but only the screen was blank. The phone tech guy said, "no problem, let's just do a clean memory wipe and restart it. Ready, go!"

"Wait, does that mean erase all my data on it?

"Ohhh, yeah.
"well can I first try to save my data?

"oh,,, welllll,.... ok" and we spent an hour downloading from my palm pilot back to my outlook.  Worked well, except most of the entries were transposed into various places. for example, everyone's home address showed up as their first name.

And for some weird reason, everyone's middle name was changed to "United States of America." Which to me is funny, and ironic. making all our ISI volunteers'  middle names sounding like they are classic representatives of our nation.  Hey... come to think of it, t'is true.  A joke by the holy spirit!

Soooo.... \ months later, still sorting some stuff out...resulted in slower work output this spring... finding lots of blanks, and jumbled data. but the fuzzy ISI Santa Cruz world gradually coming back into focus

forced me to reorganize a lot of things, including my time schedule.

(added in a ballroom dance class to escape the tech terrors. At least I can keep control over my chachas and waltzed, even if the rest of the world is falling apart.)

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Peggy's computer saga, week #6
Although my PDA died 2 weeks ago, and we supposedly erased all its data... I heard alarms ringing and found the PDA lying in my desk drawer, its screen still white blank, but lit up. It is mysteriously still ringing alarms for my appointments. Perhaps this is the after-life of its soul??? Evidence of life after death?"
Meanwhile I'm protecting my right index finger from arthritis while I sort through 3,500 contact entries (many people entered 5 times, to salvage all the important data on YOU!! so i can keep in touch with everyone. Tedious, but a bit refreshing to meditate on all the old and new friends we have through ISI Santa Cruz. If I can keep in touch with some of you then the arthritis will be worth it (hey CE people when will you invent a new mouse that doesn't rely solely on the right index finger for everything???

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(with all my calendar/tasks, backup of contact data) thanks my new chat-buddy Vinal (at a help desk somewhere in India) I miraculously hotsynched the data back on my computer just before he was telling me to reformat it, including erasing all the PDA data.
MONDAY: I got my new iPhone working!! yay (I debated between upgrading to a Blackberry vs. Iphone, but after I learned about the ATT cell phone tower on top of Baskin Engineering! that clinched it. it now works grrrrrrrrreat!
TUESDAY My computer replacement hard drive#2 died.
WEDNESDAY, computer still in shop with "rush" order, I'm typing emails with my pinky on the iphone all day.

Many apologies again for slowness of ISI work while I press forward with this important work.
Thanks for your patience!

"We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair. We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed. Through suffering, our bodies continue to share in teh death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies"
(2 Corinthians 4:8-10)

""Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us."
(Philippians 3:13-14)