Good news everyone

Finally got my old laptop back today & whatever that had been recovered from the hard discs. The good news is the 2 days of chapter work that I did but didn't have a chance to back up are there!! Luckily I didn't spend the last couple of days trying to recreate those few pages and instead worked on the Acknowledgment & Abstract. The bad news is my EndNote files are not there, which means I don't actually have a full list of all my references even though I do have what I used at the end of each chapter. I guess something is better than nothing.

Olive, oy!

I'm such a sucker for the "pls donate to this very worthy cause", particularly if there are pictures of animals included in pack. So it was not surprise that I succumbed to this plea from Seeing Eye Dogs Australia to sponsor the training of seeing eye puppies. I did that a couple of weeks ago & given my recent computer troubles I have completely forgotten that I had done it. To my surprise a packet arrived today with paw prints (printed ones, not real ones) all over it & addressed to me. Inside is my new puppy! Well, not a real puppy but a picture of it/her & progress of training thus far anyway. Here she is, Olive, stuck behind the magnetic picture frame that came with the packet. I'm told I'd get a picture update every 3 months so I'll keep y'all up to date :)


Olive now has her own Dogbook if you're on Facebook

Is a step back the remedy for a set back?

It's the Year of the Rat & for the Sheeps/Goats, as far as what I've read, it's gonna be another crappy new year ahead (when is it not ?!?!) Work sucks, love life sucks, health sucks, wealth & fortune ... all suck. It's not even 2 weeks into the new year & things are already starting to fall apart. After almost 3 years, the uni-prescribed laptop has finally died. Before it went kaput, though, it did give me enough warning on Saturday night to do a big back-up that took hours. This means that when it did die Monday night I've only lost 2 days of work (5-10 pages). Didn't think of backing up my music to the external HD even after burning the compressed files onto CDs failed (probably more a problem with the laptop in general than the CD-Rs themselves). Now I have to redo a fair few music from borrowed stuff. I think my lists of things are gone also (DVDs/CDs/books I have, budgeting things, etc) so I'm a bit lost with how much/what I've been spending in the last few days. The biggest thing was, of course, the new ASUS laptop that I got yesterday which I still haven't finished installing everything that I need (eg, camera software, camcorder software, etc) but most are on now. The old laptop got sent to recovery & I'm told C: is toast (ie lost music) but D: appears ok (yes, might be able to recover the lost 2 days' work!) but won't get anything back until early/mid next week. All of these come on top of the broken keyboard drawer & broken strings on my racquet. Hopefully all these bad stuff is gonna ride out soon otherwise I might find myself at the bottom of the ocean while on my way to icy Russia... (knock on wood)