I haven't blogged in quite a while. My 3 year old son LOVES to clean, and I let him have a squirt bottle of this Pledge stuff that is supposed to be safe for wood, glass, stainless steel, and electronics. So no worries about what he might be squirting, right? WRONG! Usually I keep an eye on him whenever he has the squirt bottle, but it got left out by mistake, and he drenched our computer when I wasn't looking, completely shorting it out and destroying it. I thought the hard drive could be salvaged, but I just plugged it in to an enclosure and wasn't able to access it.
Luckily the client I'm currently working for provided me with a laptop for that job, so my work hasn't been interrupted.
I called a few repair places, but it would be $100 just to diagnose, and $250-$300 to replace the motherboard, so we decided to just buy a new laptop instead. I'm going to take the hard drive to a repair shop to see if they can recover any of our files. I'm pretty good about backing pictures up to CD, but not very diligent about backing the other files up.
Squirt bottle blues
February 16th, 2009 at 08:08 pm
February 16th, 2009 at 08:22 pm 1234815727
February 16th, 2009 at 10:01 pm 1234821664
The loan is at 1.9%, and only for 3 years. The total interest over the life of the loan is about $300. In absolute terms it would make more sense to pay it off, but psychologically I feel better keeping $15k in our short-term accounts and $15k emergency fund untouched.
February 18th, 2009 at 02:43 am 1234925034