We did everything we knew to revive the computer, which mainly meant we poked the power button and wondered why.
Today after I dropped Em off at rehearsal (with four hours to kill either staying in Gardner or driving to and fro), I called a friend I don't call enough. Randy has a lot of expertise with computers, but he's also been a great friend going back a ways. How far back? I can remember sitting at a bar with him when the first President Bush announced that we were about to 'liberate' Kuwait (I'm pretty sure no regular folks in Kuwait felt genuinely liberated before or since that day).
His first diagnosis was a thermal issue, leave a laptop on a bed and it'll shut down or melt down. But way before all this drama, just a few months after I got her this laptop for Christmas before last, she picked it up by its lid and broke the hinge. She didn't share this info with me, thinking (rightly) that I'd have been livid. What happened, the screws that hold the bottom half of the hinge to the case stripped out of their plastic holders. On the side where the power comes in, they've almost worn through the insulation on the wiring, and a few day sor months from now, they'll cause a short and fry the sucker.
At Randy's advice, I picked up a 500GB external hard drive at Wal-Mart so Em could back up her current drive after Randy got the thing to at least wake back up. If she uses that external drive, when the laptop does finally go tits up, she can plug that external into any of a dozen computers and retrieve/edit/finish her work. Then maybe a seventeen year old needs to find a summer job to buy her own next laptop.
While we were waiting for Em to get out of rehearsal I shot some pictures through the trees into the sun. I couldn't really look through the viewfinder very well to do this, but I figured out that I could hold my finger on the shutter release and look at my forearm for when there was so much light entering the lens that it would project onto me and then squeeze off the shot.
I'd done a check to see what my shutter count was up to (found a website that you can upload a pic to to find out). The site wanted a low res JPEG, so while I normally shoot everything RAW, I switched the camera to take the test. Just shy of 20,000 shots, well under a year in. On a pace to do at least 30,000 per year, which makes me a little nervous since the D7000 is only rated for 150,000, and that means five years and I'll burn this puppy up.
Then I realized after taking these shots, to my horror, that I had forgotten to set the camera back to shooting RAW. So my sun shots and the shot I took of some bucket snowmen on 18th Street near Central, all low res JPEGs. Good thing I didn't want to print any of those as posters.
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