Tuesday early morning I drove up to Chicago (close to downtown) to see some friends of mine who were visiting their daughter and will leave this weekend back home. It was a short visit and I did not have time but to chat for a couple of hours and then drive back home, but first I got stuck in Chicago's traffic jam. It took us (Taylor and I) three ours to drive 40 ML from Maria's home. It reminded me of highways in LA. Then once out of Chicago I just kept driving... stopped once to get some gas and by 8PM we were home. Driving almost 12 hours to be there 3! It was worth since I did not see my friend Maria from long time.I hope next time I will get to see more of Chicago. That will be pretty soon in next Spring at AERA conference.
Maria and Doru enjoied Chicago and hope to come back and visit and might next time around they will come down to Edwardsville :-)
Last night my computer crashed... I graded some papers in the morning, responded e-mails, was working well. Then in the evening when I wanted to continue my work the computer just did not turn on... I have Sophos and Firewall and I am very good on not opening e-mails from not known address, I also have filter on all my e-mail accounts. So, I have no clue what happend. Might be one of the new and smart worms. If I think well one single thing was weird yesterday. A pop-up window was installing something and just was there not finishing it. So I clicked cancell and the window never went away. I worked and then turned off the computer. Then I could not turn it on again.
I called some friends computer geeks, tried to start it from CD-ROM but was something weird so we just dropped the idea by doing over the phone. Then I was able today to start in safe mode and took me 4 hours to save some files from my project. I am also pretty careful on backing up all files, but as it happens I did not back it up since mid September! Lots of work would be lost. I was in rage, desperate, furious on computers and myself, almost in tears, and with a solemn promise that I will be compulsive. It's not for the first time. I lost a final exam like 3 years ago a day before the due date. Then I kept saving everything at least once a month. Lately I forgot to be compulsive saver... bad idea!
Good lesson again to save it compulsively or upload to Z:/
I realize how lost I am if I loose my work and don't have back up.
In the end I was thankful that it is only my computer the sick one and not myself!
