Incommunicado

I'm at my friend's house using her computer for a little while.

Yesterday morning, when I left for work, I put my computer on stand-by. When I got home from work and tried to bring it back up, it hung up for so long that I held down the power button until it shut down. Then when I powered it back on, it gave me the Blue Screen of Death on the way up.

Last night I got on the phone with Dell's support line. I was expecting an Indian accent, but the guy's accent was different enough that I finally asked him where he was from. He said the Philippines, and I had that "Oh yeah!" moment when the accent and the location fit each other.

We spent almost 90 minutes on the phone and finally came to the conclusion that my hardware is fine but my operating system files are corrupted and I need to reinstall the system software, which will wipe out all my files. So I'm going to have to take my laptop and my external hard drive somewhere and have them back up all my files before the system disks arrive for reinstallation Monday or Tuesday (since I moved, I have no idea where my system CDs might be).

Which is all the long way of saying I don't have a functional computer, so I won't be blogging for a while.

Withdrawal symptoms are not pretty...