On Mon, 29 May 2023 02:04:08 +1000, Alex Goodwin - alex.goodwin at
multitel.com.au (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote to Freelance
Traveller:

>FreeTrav followed up his kill of my (now-previous) keyboard with one of
>his own.  Unfortunately, laptop keyboard kills have bigger blast radii
>than desktop kills, and said laptop is b0rked.

Pro Tip: While laptop _users_ of the techie persuasion may well enjoy Coca
Cola Zero Sugar, with or without additional flavoring via Mio or
equivalent, laptop _computers_ do not share that enjoyment.

The Story: Recently, for several reasons, not the least of which being that
I object to out Information Security department's policies regarding access
to certain techie-useful websites, I have been bringing my own laptop plus
a Mi-Fi (or rather, the AT&T equivalent) into the office.

On Friday, 26 May, the temperature was cooler than normal, so I wore my
job-emblemed jacket with the huge pockets. For the record, the huge pockets
are large enough to carry a US 20-oz bottle of soda and still be
zipperable-up.

Comes time to go home, I start packing things up. I put on the jacket, and
promptly forgot that the pockets are in fact big enough for a bottle of
soda. So, I tightened the cap on the partially-finished Coke Zero sitting
on my desk, and tucked it into the laptop bag (yes, I can tell you're
wincing, knowing what comes next).

Normally, this wouldn't be a problem; I've done it before, and it's
survived the trip home. Friday, however, being Get-Away Day (this weekend
[weakened; there's a reason the two words sound almost identical] is
Memorial Day in the USA), the subway was ... a bit more crowded than usual.
As a result, the bottle of soda got ... a little crushed in the crush. With
predictable results.

After getting home and letting the laptop sit and dry out in a fan stream
overnight, the laptop would not start up. Cue visit to local
computer-specialty-retailer-to-sparrows-and-techies. A visit to their
service desk, and an explanation of what happened, and they said they'd do
their best; unless the SSD got blasted when I tried to start it up, they
figured they should be able to recover a lot of the data.

They recovered every byte, thanks be to whatever deitic principle you
acknowledge. The rest of the box was a writeoff; they could have repaired
it for about the same cost as purchasing a new box, but it'd never be the
same, and I'd have no good estimate of the expected life. So, two kilobucks
later, I had a newer, more powerful box, with a couple of extra
peripherals, and once they handed me the recovered data, home to start
migrating same to new box.

There's still some migrating to be done; I need to font up the new box,
which will take some time, but I've managed to get the main email client
back up and running, so from the standpoint of TML and submissions, all is
back to normal - the freelancetraveller.com addresses are still live and
will be pulled on the normal schedule.

Depending on how long it takes to font up the new box, the next issue of
Freelance Traveller _might_ be delayed. It's still early, though, so I'm
not committing to a statement either way. Yet.

>Email (to xxxxxx@gmail.com and/or xxxxxx@outlook.com) _might_
>work, but I'm cautioned that delays will be longer than usual.  You
>might get multiple replies if you send to the gmail address, several
>days apart, to one message.

>"DO NOT SEND SUBMISSIONS TO OUTLOOK. To GMAIL is OK, but will not be
>acknowledged until after disaster cleanup." - FreeTrav

Still true - I need to install Thunderbird and figure out how to get the
old TB email database into the new installation (without having the old
installation to work from, just the recovered appdata); that'll get the
gmail address fully on-line again. The Outlook email is looked at on a
completely different box, which I don't look at more than about once a day
most days, and sometimes, if life is being particularly abusive, not even
that.

®Traveller is a registered trademark of
Far Future Enterprises, 1977-2022. Use of
the trademark in this notice and in the
referenced materials is not intended to
infringe or devalue the trademark.

--
Jeff Zeitlin, Editor
Freelance Traveller
    The Electronic Fan-Supported Traveller® Resource
xxxxxx@freelancetraveller.com
http://www.freelancetraveller.com

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