Further proof that GCSE metalwork was the most valuable part of my formal education.

Yak-shaving at its finest:

• This weekend, I wanted to work on my thesis.
• But my laptop refused to boot up (inevitable, really, after this post). I had backups of the thesis, but they were a few days old.
  • Edit: First, I tried booting from CD.
  • But that didn't work.
  • So I tried some other CDs.
  • But they didn't work either.
  • So I tried the boot CDs in a different machine.
  • They worked, so I concluded that the problem was with the machine and not the CDs.
  • So I tried to remove the hard drive and mount it in a USB drive cradle.
  • But the screw heads on the drive mount sheared off when I tried to unscrew them.
  • So I tried all the screwdrivers in my toolbox until I found one that fitted better.
  • I found one, but the first two screw heads were now too damaged to use.
  • So I tried removing the screws with pliers.
  • But the pliers skittered off before they managed to turn the screws.
  • So I tried to file down the sides of the screw heads into rounded squares, so the pliers would get better grip.
  • But the protruberances on the sides of the drive enclosure got in the way of the file.
  • So I had to file them down first.

That, I think, was the high-point of the call stack: I've elided various extra steps and dead ends. In the end, I was able to (a) recover all the data (including over a year of un-backed-up mountain photographs), and (b) mount the hard drive in another laptop which had a broken hard drive, thus cobbling together one working computer out of two broken ones. But overall, a less than productive weekend.