| Tuesday, October 17, 2006 |
| “well, it sounds like this.” |
When someone’s computer is actually broken, this is usually the evidence presented by the hapless owner. They say it makes no noise, or too much noise, or the wrong noise. Then they try to imitate the sound of their broken computer, but they end up making a variety of animal noises instead—the shrieking caw of a crow, a low rumbling growl, or the whiny, plaintive bleating of a goat. Those are usually problems with the actual sound system of the computer, and are easily fixed by an updated driver or a replacement part. But the truly catastrophic, apocalyptic sounds—and trust me, I have personal experience in this matter—are far less biological in nature. An electrical discharge, a real live flash-gordon sound effects zap, means the two-thousand-dollar laptop that you brought to Europe but forgot to flip the voltage switch on has literally fried most or all of its internal components, and has become a very expensive, but also very satisfying and therapeutic bludgeon to use on the person who “told you so.” Hard drive failure, the most tragic of computer injuries, has a fitting accompaniment. The entire system freezes, abruptly halting any sound the computer was making, and from the case, a moment later, emanates a horrifying scrape-click, scrape-click, scrape-click that is the actual sound of a sharp point of metal pushing against, dragging across, and gouging into the delicately-textured discs containing, for instance, the only complete copy of your work as a writer. It is the sound of a child who doesn’t know his own strength drawing on the sidewalk, dragging a piece of chalk along the concrete, until the chalk gives, and snaps, and silence.
Computer parts do just go bad. Charges diminish, moving parts wear out. The disks in a hard drive spin constantly at tens of thousands of revolutions per minute. These things have life spans. Data, however, doesn’t. Long after the moving parts of a hard drive have died, the information stored on it is still there—someone just needs the skill and technology to go in and retrieve it, and that’s where Data Recovery Specialists come in. You give them a broken hard drive and they salvage whatever is intact. Nothing is ever truly lost.
So what is a writer, then, if not his body of work? A writer writes, right? Are you still a writer if you’ve never been published? If you shove all your writing in a locked drawer somewhere and never show it to anyone? If you shred every page of writing you produce? What about when your hard drive goes bad? Are you a writer if you have no writing? Nothing is ever truly lost, but Data Recovery has a price. My broken hard drive was holding my life as a writer hostage for prices starting at one thousand dollars. How much is my writing worth? |
posted by La Malinche @ 1:11 AM   |
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| 1 Comments: |
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To me, it would be worth it.
I should note, however, that traditionally I've usually deleted all traces of stuff over five years old by my self because I couldn't bear how bad it was.
++Andrew
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To me, it would be worth it.
I should note, however, that traditionally I've usually deleted all traces of stuff over five years old by my self because I couldn't bear how bad it was.
++Andrew