8/8/09

No energy for a picture tonight ... just a story. So I am developing an online course for the college for this fall. It isn't that I necessarily procrastinate (well sometimes) ... but, it has just been such a busy busy summer. So I have been working like crazy on it finishing it up the last few weeks. I need to have it up this weekend because other faculty review the courses prior to the semester starting. Typically I just load my course directly into Blackboard. However, on one of the courses I reviewed earlier this summer, Blackboard crashed and the instructor lost her whole course. I decided that I would save everything onto my hard drive before saving it into Blackboard, so I would not have that problem.

Last night at at 2 (I don't sleep much anymore), I had just finalized my 8-page syllabus (ugh), with a special section on how computer problems do not justify turning in an assignment late. I had all the sections written and was about 3/4 of the way through loading the into the course site. I decided to head to bed, feeling pretty good I would be able to finish everything up in the morning and have my whole Saturday.

About 2:30 I heard a weird beeping sound. I woke Jeff up and for the life of us we could not figure where it came from. Jeff thought it might be the battery beeping on the smoke detector, so he went and got the ladder (again 2:30 AM) and started to check it out. But it wasn't the smoke detector, it was a beeping coming from my netbook.

In April, I bought a netbook (a mini-laptop). I love it and use it way more than I use our home computer. It has been perfect for teaching, because I really can just throw it in my bag and work on school stuff anywhere. I had no idea why it would be beeping and powered it down again and went to bed.

This morning I sat down to check my email, and guess what, the computer wouldn't work. I called Costco tech line and we tried 3-4 different things and then they conducted me with the manufacturer's tech line (grrr, I hate outsourcing) and after 3-4 tries at different things he tells me that I will have to send it in and it was take 7-10 business days to fix it.

NOOOOOOOOOO! I really live on my computer. That is probably lame, but true. Plus, we are leaving any day for Iowa and my whole consolation about being away from Blake is that I have Skype and Alicia has Skype and so he can actually see us everyday. Plus I have work to do while I am gone and seriously I was starting to stress.

Costco is awesome that they have a 90 return/exchange policy ... but of course it was 120 days since I bought it. I called our Costco and talked to a manager and it must have been my lucky day because they said they would exchange it for me. Seriously, I will now buy every electronics item from them. They have a customer for LIFE!

Luckily I don't save much on the hard drive of this computer (no pictures, etc). I save documents for school, but usually back them up on a USB drive also ... unless of course it is 2 am. So the bad news is, I lost my documents for my class. Amazingly I have almost everything generated again.

I'm working on the home computer while trying to get all my programs reloaded and formatted into my netbook. So much for a laid back Saturday, sigh. But this story has a much better ending than it could have. I'm *almost* done and I have my computer back. And, I need a nap.

Oh, did I mention that my cell phone stopped working yesterday too?