Not so luminiferous.aethernet any more
Friday, September 22nd, 2006 06:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manluminiferous'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.
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.
