Since November is National Blog Posting Month, I’ve decided to step up my blogging and join the challenge. All you have to do is blog every day for the entire month of November. Seems easy, right? I’ve been having trouble writing something a few times a week, so this is going to be interesting. NaBloPoMo is an offshoot of NaNoWriMo which stands for National Novel Writing Month. The object of that little happening is to write a 50,000 word novel over the course of a month. That’s a wee bit too far out of my league, so I’m going to stick with the blogging. I can’t promise all of it (or any of it) will be interesting, but I’m hoping you’ll be entertained at least once or twice. Some will be serious, as I’m trying to be honest here, but I’m quite certain my sarcasm will come shining through for your enjoyment.

So! To start the festivities, I’ll share with you how incredibly stupid I am. That’s always good for a laugh, right?

I’ve been working with computers all my life. I built my first one when I was in 4th grade, and it’s been a love/hate relationship ever since. I am not afraid to admit that I’m a geek, and that playing with a new computer or software is far more exciting to me than going to a club or bar. You’d think that based on my love for computers and my past experience, that I would be very cautious when it comes to backing up, viruses, updates, etc.

Not so much.

Monday, my computer decided to make a mockery of me and died. Just up and quit. Black screen of death. It won’t start Windows, fights the diagnostic check, and only runs the backup CD once every 5 attempts. Glorious. Do I have an external hard drive where I’ve backed up all my most important documents? Nope! Do I have a server where I could have potentially backed up my things? Yep! Sitting in the second bedroom right next to my desktop collecting dust. Is it hooked up? Nope. Hadn’t got around to that yet. *sigh* This is the Computer God’s way of punishing me for my trust in my own ability to repair things, should a problem occur (read: being too cheap to buy the extended warranty). So now my buddy Brian, who serves as the computer guru at my office (If Denora can’t fix it, CALL BRIAN!), is taking a look at it, and it doesn’t look good. It appears that a virus has hacked its lovely little way into my hard drive and rendered it stupid. Which means I have potentially lost all of my wedding photos, vacation photos, 20GB of music, my website files, and various other odds and ends that I’ve saved over the last 3 years. My sister told me that she has copies of my wedding pics, so I’ve stopped freaking out about that. But everything else is potentially gone. There’s still the slight possibility that the data, if not the drive, can be salvaged, so keep your fingers crossed! Regardless, I’m going to have to go get another hard drive. I’m less than pleased about this. I am, however, aware that this is entirely my fault, and that I deserve it for being so lackadaisical about net security and backups. Will I learn from this? Only time, and my Best Buy credit card, will tell.