Most people did not see the panicked comment I left at the "Hi There" post. I couldn't get on the Internet at home, so I couldn't post anything. I had to go to the church and leave a comment to communicate with you.
My computer abruptly stopped cooperating with me last Thursday. No amount of coaxing could convince it to connect to the internet. A friend of mine from the church who is a computer professional couldn't figure it out either. After running some tests, he suspected that the hard drive was beginning to fail.
Yikes.
Luckily I was able to buy a new hard drive last night and install Windows XP on it. I then moved the entire contents of my old hard drive to a folder on the new one. Today I will begin the tedious task of reinstalling all my software and migrating all of my data files over from the old files.
I tried to call the Radio folks for advice on bringing my blog software over to the new hard drive, but was unable to get them on the phone. My fear was that if I made a mistake, I might wipe out the existing blog archives. This is not an unrealistic fear. There is a rather delicate relationship between the blog archives on a blogger's computer and the blog files that are online at the salon.com server. I have backups of everything I've written, of course, but I didn't want the hassle of having to rebuild the whole site.
An email tip from Chuck Sigars made me feel brave enough to give it a try myself. In this case it is as simple as dragging the entire radio folder over to the now classic “Program Files” directory that is standard on all Windows computers.
I ran a quick test and confirmed it. I'm back.
I spent four days with no computer and, more importantly, no Internet. I was fascinated to discover how uncomfortable I felt. I was cut-off from the world. I don't watch much TV anymore, and I don't read the newspaper. I get all my information from the web. And then there was my blog. I couldn't check the comments or email. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I felt rather lonely and isolated.
I knew blogging had become important to me, but I wasn't aware of the powerful emotional impact it has had on my life. Okay, I was aware, but didn't want to admit it to myself. Was there a time before blogging? I'm sure there was, but I'm having a hard time remembering what I was like back then. Was there a time before the Internet? What did we do back in those primitive days?
Once I accepted my forced hiatus, I found it to be rather relaxing. It was nice to spend some free time puttering around the house. It was nice not to be informed the minute someone did something bad to someone else somewhere on the globe. It was nice to spend a little time in the silence and peace of my own life.
Sunday morning I told Michael Main that I probably need to try to stay off the Internet for longer periods of time. Like only check my blog for comments at the end of the day.
Always the realist, he simply laughed and said, “Right!”

rlp