Erasure

My chunky old HP laptop died on me yesterday. I went into our home office to see the machine had rebooted, with the warning that the system had recovered from a 'serious error'. My mind was elsewhere, I surfed, then went to watch tv. By the time I came back to the laptop, the death rattle had gone and been. All attempts to boot resulted in a brief blue-screen flicker then the machine switching itself off. Nothing doing.

This was somewhat irritating. Although I have everything backed up on a Lacie external drive , with the last back-up at the weekend (including of course all my Northern Nigeria pics), i hadn't backed up the past two days of report writing (the official version of my trip to the North). So now I have to rewind and remember. Grrrr.

On telly, you often come across stories about paedophile's computers being seized, with the implicit warning that nothing can be erased forever on a computer (remember what happened to Pete Townsend?). Enough to stoke a little fear in any casual pornographer's soul. Don't believe it. I set a young tecchie to the task today. He tried to re-boot the hard drive, using an external hard-drive gadget. Nada. He then put the drive in the freezer for a few hours (this is apparently a last resort stage) and tried again. Zen like emptiness of being. Not a file remained.

Just as human beings can appear in the middle of the country, mud on shoes, without a clue who they are or where they have come from, with only a prodigious talent (say for the piano) to mark them out from anonymity, so too can computers lose the plot, and end up in erasure.