Technology Sucks. RIP Squirt 2002-2006.

So, my computer died a week ago. I'm typing this on a borrowed laptop that my friend almost never uses. Bless her. We need to work out the details of this custody thing (alternate weekends or something) but she's perfectly fine with my using this for as long as I need to until I figure out how to get myself a new computer of my own.

At least I'm not under deadline for anything...like when my logicboard died in the middle of November the first year I had Squirt (the old iBook, in case you didn't catch that) and I had five papers to write over the next four weeks.

It was the video card that died. To get it fixed would probably work out to about half of just getting a new MacBook and given that the old one was four years old and had seen me through the rough and tumble of university life, it seems better to let it go. Still, not all is lost. Right now, it's essentially just a large iPod charger. It turns out, I can log in and it'll update my iPod. But I can't see anything that I'm doing. And it won't connect to an external monitor, which is how I know that it's the video card and not just the screen.

So, at least I know that all my information is on there and retrievable at some point. It also means that I can use it as an external hard drive to back things up on after I get the new one. Not exactly practical but, again, not all is lost.

I named it Squirt when I first got it because it was so much smaller than the clamshell iBook that it was replacing. This morning I woke up with a name for the as yet purchased new one: Virgil. It will be my companion (not exactly my guide, but certainly trusty sidekick) as I'm figuring things out over the next little while. I don't know that I'm quite traveling through Hell right now, but it's at least some kind of Purgatory where I need to get my shit together and figure out what is the proper path for me to be on.

Hopefully, I'll have the new compute sooner rather than later, but I have to figure out how to pay for it. But I have more important things to figure out how to pay for, like new glasses and a new winter coat and new boots and heating oil and.... Yeah. You get the picture.

I could really use a Virgil about now to help point me on the right path though I have to remember, too, that Dante didn't get help straight away when he was lost. Yes, it came fairly quickly but he had a literary schedule to keep. He couldn't wander lost for 8 cantos. He had to get down to business.

Part of me has been puzzling recently about the coffee thing and about where, really, I'd be best to do it. I have the advantage here of being a big fish in a little pond. Still, as I've said before many a time, this pond is rather small for my liking and I don't have a need really to be #1. There's also part of me that feels like the ideals of 'third wave' coffee needs to be represented out here on the East Coast. This isn't me getting cold feet about the possibility of moving, more just a puzzling through my reasons for wanting to move and perhaps my path in coffee, if that is indeed where I'm meant to be. Add to that mix an idea that was pitched to me in outline form last night that would take a lot of work to bring together but that would potentially offer me an amazing experience in helping to set up and run a non-profit coffee endeavour that could focus much more on education than simply producing amazing coffee. Before my computer died, I'd been working on an essay about the vital importance of consumer education and trying to puzzle through how to balance consumer education with the need to make sure that you can get through a line to the door in 5ish minutes.

That essay is trapped on my computer right now, though I may soon start it from scratch since it was a bit of a mess anyway.

So, lots on my mind as of late, as always. Still plugging along, though, which is the important thing.