Tech woes

Aw man, what a week.

The hosting company that we use to host client websites got a virus that spread through at least a couple of their servers, and infected a bunch of our clients' sites, so I spent quite a bit of time today dealing with that, and earlier this week we had similar (although not virus-related) problems at a different hosting company, and I guess my Palm Pilot must have had some kind of error overnight which caused it to stay ON all night, completely discharge the battery, and go back to its original state, which means that ALL of the data that was on it is gone.

It's currently syncing with my desktop, but I hadn't synced it for awhile, since the battery is so long-lasting -- before, with the other one, I'd plug it in and sync it every day, but the rechargable battery in this one lasts a week or more, so I'm much less diligent. I don't know when I synced it last, frankly. So I have no idea what I've lost. Certainly the checkbook entries that I made when I paid bills last weekend; any calendar events that I entered, although I've been pretty good about entering those in iCal, so I'm probably okay there . . . And, of course, I can get the checkbook stuff from the bank sites online; since more and more things like that are online, carrying it all around with me becomes less important, but I like to at least have the illusion of control . . .

It's enough to make me want to go back to a paper calendar, which I have actually been thinking about.

My friend Micki was here last weekend for her highschool reunion. One of our very favorite things to do when she lived here a decade ago was to go to office supply stores. We went to Office Max on Sunday for old time's sake, but it wasn't really the same. Still, it was fun, and we looked at calendars there. She asked me what I used, and I said a Palm Pilot, but I was getting a little disillusioned with it because it's heavy, and I've been entering calendar items on my phone, which works pretty well.

And I've been writing my grocery list on a pad of paper. I don't know, maybe I had a premonition that this was going to happen, and this was the universe's way of letting me down easy and preparing me for the data loss.

It's still syncing. I'm almost afraid to look.

Micki and I had a good time last weekend. I knew she was coming this month, but not exactly when. She called on Thursday and said she was in town, and that she was cold--she hadn't counted on it being so cool here in September. She lived in Hawaii up until a couple of weeks ago, though, so that's probably to be expected.

So I took her to Target and she bought warm socks and sweatshirt (blue) and I bought the same sweatshirt (lavender), which was fun, then we went to dinner at a Mexican restaurant and talked for about four hours. It's pretty cool how you can see someone only once every few years (I think it was at least five years since I had seen her, maybe more), and then just immediately, and easily, drop back into the old friendship.

She had reunion stuff going on on Friday and Saturday, but she called on Sunday and went to Office Max and WalMart and ate out again, and went to one of those public storage locker places where she had some stuff stored, and just spent most of the day running around. Just like old times. Oh, and then went back to her hotel and sat in the bar for another hour or so, still talking.

Later . . .

It's now close to midnight, and I've spent about four hours updating the Palm Pilot. The sync worked pretty well, except that my photos got all screwed up, and while I realize that they're not really vital, it's something that I really like, so I probably spent about two of those hours reinstalling photo apps and photos (no, it shouldn't have taken that long, but . . . it did. Long story, not worth telling). Then I spent another hour (probably) updating my checkbook record, and then another hour trying to get everything else back the way it was. The big problem with restoring a Palm from backup is that although I may have deleted things from the device itself, the backup copy on the computer doesn't know that.

So when you restore it, you get a bunch of stuff that you didn't really want and (at least in my case) there's so much that the memory fills up, and then you're basically screwed. I had to reset it a couple of times. What a pain.

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