Not so luminiferous.aethernet any more

[lethargic_man]

luminiferous's keyboard is dying. Two hours into the three hour train journey up to my parents' in Newcastle the keys down the left stopped working. I took the keyboard off and reinserted the ribbon cable, as before, but this time it didn't seem to have any effect.

After an hour of tinkering, both on the train and in Newcastle, I finally got it to the stage where it was working, with the keyboard held up in the air. Needing something non-conducting to hold it there so I could log on and get my data off, I reached for the nearest appropriately sized and shaped object and shoved it between the keyboard and the machine. The object was a piece of marble floor slab from the Roman baths at the Asclepion (temple-hospital complex) at Shuni (Mayumas), on the east-facing side of the southwestern tip of Mount Carmel. Ill people came there, perhaps for centuries, and trod on this beautiful marble floor in the baths. Then for sixteen hundred years it lay in the ground. Then it got dug up, salvaged from a scrap-heap as a souvenir by me (along with a couple of mosaic tiles and a pot end), and now it was used to help me get my data off my dying laptop. Oh, the incongruity!

It remains to be seen whether the keyboard is going to be salvageable or not. If not, I might end up having to get a new laptop. Or, bearing in mind that new laptops are similarly nickable to new bikes, possibly an old one secondhand.

Comments

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Apropos of nothing in particular, I have started a process of devouring Charles Stross's novels recently. I am very impressed, and slapping myself for not having checked him out sooner. :)

Charlie Stross

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Which have you been reading? Accelerando knocked my socks off, and I also really like The Atrocity Archive, for a different way of looking at the Cthulhu Mythos, but one which makes perfect sense once it's been pointed out. After Accelerando, though, Singularity Sky came across as rather weak, and I've not bothered with the sequels.

I currently have a copy of Glasshouse waiting for me to finish The Last Film of Emile Vico before reading.

[snjstar.livejournal.com]

How is your laptop doing? I had to replace mine in July.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

A bit of meths and it was back to its normal flaky state. I intend to continue using it until it gives up the ghost entirely; I take the environmental impact of retiring a machine seriously, and whilst I would like a machine that doesn't hang in Linux, and which in Windows doesn't suffer the mouse pointer staying still whilst the screen scrolls instead, and whose Ethernet card isn't on the blink, and without a flaky USB port, and which goes into standby mode properly from within Linux, I don't need it. Or not in my laptop, at least. epicyclic is another matter.

When I do get a new laptop, I'll possibly get a secondhand one a year or two old, to replace its nickability—it's the new bike problem all over again...