I've made a scheduled, routine activity out of each of several things since I've been here: prayer; dog walking and feeding; academic work, at least for as long as I could. I have not put blogging on a schedule, and I've lapsed in doing it at all for a while now. What didn't help was the complete expiration of my old faithful laptop, eyegor.
Nearly all day Saturday and Sunday, I plugged away at data manipulation for the project arising from the conference paper. The paper is in a line of studies using a survey data set available online. Previous authors had a working version that reduced the immense data set's size to only those respondents and variables treated in the series of studies. I want to introduce a variable they never had, which meant constructing the working data set all over again from the original, since a unique case identifier wasn't one of the variables retained in the working version. Picking out which rows had been used, though, was itself a bit of a challenge; the language about case selection in the original paper was only mostly right, or, rather, not fully specific. The upshot was that just pulling that off took me till Sunday afternoon.
It was as if eyegor were holding out for me to get that chunk of work finished and saved. Not long after, eyegor lost power unexpectedly. It could not be turned back on. The power system had worn out. While I figured some possibility existed of opening up the beaten, separating case and looking for anything fixable in the power system, the likelihood of success didn't seem to justify the effort needed. A moment I'd been actively hoping for months and months to put off for months and months had arrived: I was without a working laptop.
Pretty quickly, I shifted gears. My whole life was now directed toward getting a new laptop on which I could continue my work. I had known for a long time what I would shop for would be very different from my last computer: not a desktop replacement like eyegor; rather, a very lightweight, inexpensive machine from which remotely to log in to my office server, frankenstein, and do my serious computing there. Not only do I have a proper desktop everywhere I really want to use one for crunching numbers, watching video, or, eventually, gaming again, I really haven't got the money for a new laptop at all, so I'd better be going pretty cheap if I'm stuck buying one. Using C—'s own computer, so helpfully left behind, I went online to price the least expensive netbooks I could find as early as Sunday night. Monday morning I went out and bought one.
I ought to have been back up and running right away then, but, in fact, I spent a good two days fixing and backing up things to get the new laptop in the shape in which I want to use it. Much of that down time was spent pestering various friends to figure out who had an external hard drive I could use. Some, specifically all yesterday afternoon, was spent in the kitchen, preparing from scratch some pierogi and golabki that, in the end, went grossly pear-shaped.
Now, however, it's Wednesday night, and I've watched the last NHL game of the year, and the netbook is up and running for real. This, then, is your opportunity to say hi to inga. Tomorrow afternoon, Inga and I will return to work on the conference paper (from campus, since I'll be on duty in the computer lab in the early afternoon). Tomorrow morning, I may take myself to the municipal Theater Guild just down the street, to meet and talk to anyone there if it happens to be open. It's been far too long since I've been on the stage, you see -- more than four whole years -- and their suburban group seem to me the people to know for getting back onto it.
Last, I'll also write a blog entry tomorrow, at 9:00 in the morning. I don't know what I shall have to write about except perhaps a stray thought or two on realignment of Major League Baseball.
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