A Friday to remember.
So I woke up on Friday morning and did the usual things–got up, showered, and dressed, and read my email. The top article in my RSS inbox was from Salon, probably my favorite web pub. It was a piece on Steve Jobs, Apple, and DRM, and of particular interest because of both subject matter and author. The topic is near and dear (what with my open source info-hippie leanings), as is the author. One of my personal favorite scifi/cyberpunk/infogeekery writer/thinkers, Cory Doctorow.
The delightful thing about this particular day?
In just a few short hours, I was having lunch with Cory Doctorow.
He’s just as cool and hip and brilliant in person. We got to talk about a great variety of things, from the obvious–like his new book and his essay about Jobs–and the patently odd. Porn as an edge case, the single tattoo he chose as a young adult, his world-class fidgeting habit. He’s really an odd and delightful guy, friendly as can be, and funny as hell. The wit that seeps out of his stage persona is his actual razor-edged tongue, and between his sly commentary and the ever-marvelous social graces of pjones, a fabulous lunch was had by all.
It was really one of the more awesome afternoons of my life.
I love books with a passion that sometimes edges towards non-sanity. Yet I somehow managed to do my job and not totally start squealing like a teenager. But only barely.
And, a true indicator of the impact of this event?
Just a few short hours earlier in the week, my beloved Morpheus–main machine and the workhorse on which I do almost all my gaming, geeking, writing, photo management, storage, and pretty much everything that isn’t for those who employ me principally–had suffered a hard drive crash so complete and entire that he would no longer boot. At all. In any OS.
And let’s just say? I’d been lax about backups. (Cory Doctorow, who is a fastidious backer-upper, would totally have never had this problem.) And this is a travesty that not only took hours to fix, but also means I miss out on this year’s Nevermore to get it rectified.
But am I perturbed about this? Not in the least. I had lunch with Cory Doctorow. It was my own damn fault. Maybe it was the universe’s way of telling me to do a little application pruning. And maybe some proper backing up.
Anyway, I spent the entire day today with a dear friend (thanks, d!), removing the smoking hunk of drive, and replacing it with a new brain donated by the spare hardware closet down the road.
In the silver lining department, I suppose–if you have photos of mine from the last, oh, five or six years? They just got a lot more valuable. Very limited editions.
Oh, and me? I had lunch with Cory Doctorow. And it was awesome.