At Pennsic, my prosthetic brain[1] failed, taking six weeks of
not-backed-up memories with it (which was doubly annoying because
I thought that I had backed it up in mid-July). So not
only did I lose most of the notes I'd taken on it during Pennsic,
including the email address of the woman from House Bloodjack I'm
supposed to send mandolin-tabulature transcriptions to (if anybody
from Bloodjack is reading this, contact me, eh?) and my records
of recent credit union activity (I think I can get back on track
regarding my current balance unless there are outstanding checks
that I've entirely forgotten about (which is the sort of thing I
needed a prosthetic brain for in the first place, right?)), I also
lost all my calendar notes about upcoming gigs and potential gigs,
and the contact info fron the person from the city government
I need to talk nicely to about my difficulties in getting my front
windows replaced (as the city has ordered, threatening large
fines).[2]
When I noticed the PDA wouldn't power up, I started taking notes
on index cards. *sigh* I've already misplaced the first stack
of those, which included some calendar notes. (I'm still looking
for 'em ... but this is one of the reasons a PDA was a better
solution for me than going old-tech[3] -- I didn't randomly
misplace pages of it.) So at this point I'm really not quite
certain where I'm supposed to be, when. I think I've got a gig
tomorrow, but all I could find digging through archived email
is next weekend, and anything farther out is a blank (except that
I do remember that the Anne Arundel Scottish Games, usually in
October, unfortunately won't be happening this year).
Between fibro-fog[4] and just generally being disorganized
without the tools I've gotten used to, I really do kind of feel
like a chunk of my brain is offline. My jokes about the PDA
being my prosthetic brain were perhaps closer to the mark than
I'd realized. This is a terribly frustrating feeling (though
the changes in memory in my bio-brain after the fibro got bad
are even more frustrating[5], and there are brain diseases and
injuries out there that I find uncomfortable to even think
about the possibility of -- <<shudder>>). I'm
feeling ... helpless and incompetent. *grumble*
I think I've got another broken Clié around here
somewhere that I picked up a couple of years ago for spare
parts, if I can remember where it migrated to, so maybe,
if the battery problem is a wear issue rather than a shelf-life
issue[6], I can do a battery-transplant and get my brain
back. Failing that, I may have to take a whole lot of stuff
out of my purse to make room for a DayRunner binder (that
seems so huge after a few years of using a PDA instead)
and get a printer working well enough to print out a stack of
the custom pages I used to use in it.
In the meantime, I'm still trying to reconsruct my
calendar for the next couple months ... and pondering
better ways to keep multiple copies of the information all
accessible and constantly in sync with each other, once I
reconstruct it. (A PDA that runs Linux would be a good start,
I think, but IIRC there was only one that did, it wasn't
marketed in the US, and was too expensive on eBay the last
time I looked.) With the calendar tool in PalmOS, I think
I could make it automagically sync with Outlook -- which I
don't use -- or I could get at the PC copy of the info through
the Palm Desktop app, but I didn't sync every week because
I had to do a backup-to-Memory-Stick beforehand, then restore
afterward, then access a backed-up spreadsheet via FilePoint,
to unscramble some bizarre screwage hotsync did to the
Documents To Go installation I used for spreadsheets ...
I liked my prosthetic brain, but it wasn't perfect.
Whee. Gonna go comb my email for dates again.
( Footnotes, including a non-computer example of
'deadlock', some muttering about tools, and a bit more
frustration and bitterness than I expected to come bubbling
up when I started writing this )