I'm gonna be honest, I'm going through it a bit right now, hence the lack of journal posts. It's alright, everything is fine—strictly speaking, work is a grind but a pretty positive one (I got a really nice thank you card from one of the other employees for helping them out so much, and I think I am selling more ESP than anyone else still, a month on, so I feel pretty confident in myself), and the group is chatty as always and I think pretty close?—mostly just working on a lot of really cool things I can't share with everybody right now, and that's making me feel disjointed and disconnected from my normal routine of posting on here and keeping everyone in the loop. Maybe I should just tell everyone everything, let the closets empty, relieve the pressure, but dammit, that would be a lot less cool. I'm at a loss.

Back when I wrote "eMachines Box update!" in August, I said this:

And part of indulging is also realizing that this machine, and everything on it, is both fleeting and also renewable. I was worried about wearing out the CD drive, but it's not a Mac where I can't switch shit out if need or want be. There's a million other CD drives I can put in here if it dies. I have that power now. Hell, if the motherboard dies or something catastrophic, I can just replace it with any number of period-appropriate motherboards and reuse the case and all the components.

Well, Cammy found out about that. The eMachines Box started running awfully, weirdly slow a few weeks ago. I started looking into ways to speed it up (wasn't a fragmentation issue, wasn't running a lot of processes, wasn't a lot more than usual going on at bootup), and the thought of it being a failing hard drive definitely crossed my mind, but I put it out after running chkdsk and seeing "0KB in bad sectors". Admittedly, I should've checked the SMART data for the drive as well, but this runs XP, which doesn't have a way to check that built-in and I don't have an external tool for checking it. Will get one.

Thinking it was still something on the drive itself slowing it down, I ran the Disk Cleanup wizard—which took four days and never got past "compressing old data". I tried to stop it, it didn't seem to respond to me—and then I turned around, caught it restarting, and up came a really lovely message after it tried to network boot:

Amusingly, showing this to a guy at work made him go "oh, we had that monitor!". He's a bit older than me, so.

So the hard drive has failed. Now thankfully, data loss really isn't a concern this time—I've been backing up to my flash drives, so I lost, at most, a prototype for a site I'm working on and all the games I installed. Mostly, it sucks not having an eMachines Box to use! I peeled it open (it is still vile inside, thank you kindly Nicole) and found it had a 120GB Western Digital Caviar drive in there, so I have a 250GB replacement, same make and model, coming on the 17th. Before it gets here (today is day five of five for this work week, I have two days off tomorrow and Friday the 17th), I'll be taking all the compressed air I bought from work last night and deep cleaning it out on the deck. I wanted to save this for when I did the proper upgrades I have in mind on it, but meh. Make it easier on myself when that comes in the spring.

When I get the new drive installed, assuming it works, I'll be putting Media Center Edition on there instead of Professional, which is what I mistakenly put on there back when I did the reinstalls on it back in 2020. Media Center 2005 is what came on it, but I'm gonna be upgrading it to SP3 because of course. The new drive is also bigger than the old one, so I think I might get some more of my (ever-growing) music library on there, we'll see. Only suits. Also, the march of reinstalling all my games!

It's a weird feeling—dunno if I'd really call it melancholic because it's only a few days downtime, but I'm so used to hearing it whir under my desk, and at the moment, it's silent and everything's off and, I dunno, that was my computer, man. Loved that thing. It was also the way I wrote journal entries and responded to GenetQuest, so I'm not doing any site stuff or writing at the moment. That sucks a bit too. I had to WebFTP into cammy.somnol to update the journal this time since I'm on OS X and don't have my site stuff set up on this install.

Here, on a positive note, do check the art gallery on my temp site at mari@macintosh.garden. I got everything I drew in October uploaded, including another Cammy I did and, probably the best thing I've ever drawn, an experimentally-shaded Devon I did to practice smaller cats. Really settling into a style here, which is nice! I'm also uploading over on FurAffinity and Weasyl now as CoffeeColoredBadger, so if anything's really good, you can expect it posted over there too. Feel free to follow.