My so called life

A few weeks ago the hard drive on my laptop (Apple Powerbook) started to die. Not your normal, everyday hard drive crash where you lose everything, but a slow painful one. I took that opportunity to back everything up off of it to my desktop computer. To this day my laptop is still alive and kicking, though for every 1 minute of productive use I have to sit through another minute or five of listening to my hard drive thrash away. I did get a replacement hard drive for it from Dave for 20 bucks, it's not new but neither is my laptop... I just need it to last a little longer. But rather than spend the time to put in the replacement hard drive, I decided to take some time this weekend to reformat and re-install OSX on the laptop to see if maybe, just maybe, it wasn't the hard drive. It actually went very well, and worked all that night. But I soon found that it wasn't to be. It's back to being virtually unusable because of the constant long delays between doing anything. So, hopefully a project for this coming weekend.

I got home from work today and turned on my desktop computer. As it was booting up I decided to go use the bathroom. While I was in there I could swear that I was hearing my computer constantly reboot. That power on self test has a distinct sound to it. So I shut everything down, blew the dust out of it (why not), and turned it back on. My hard drive was making a clanking sound and it wouldn't even get to the POST. Dead. Gone. Bye bye.

Suck.

My how far I've fallen.

We won't talk about my years worth of data, music I've purchased off of iTunes, etc... Cause of course a computer professional such as myself would have made backups of all that stuff! Professional indeed.

Suck.

The good news is, I played a game of chess tonight. It was against an opponent who, on the icc, was a little bit weaker than me but it should have been a good game. I'm guessing he was stoned. Below is the next to last move. I'm playing black and it's black to move. What did I play? (hint: Black to play, mate in 1).



*** SPOILER WARNING ***

The actual game went as follows (the last move is the answer to the puzzle above):

1. e4 c5 2. Nc3 Nc6 3. Nf3 g6 4. d4 cxd4 5. Nxd4 Bg7 6. Be3 Nf6 7. Bc4 O-O8. Nxc6 dxc6 9. O-O Qc7 10. Qe2 Ng4 11. Bd2 Qxh2# {White checkmated} 0-1

Until next time, Ed.