Let’s see if I can put this into perspective…

For the first weekend in August I have hanging over my head the ominous loss of employment at the end of October.  Like most companies in this recession, my main source of income is scaling back and laying off employees.  And this is not the environment to be looking for a job, I can tell you that much, yet here I am.  But it could be worse: They could have not told me until it was time to pack up and leave.  At least I have some time to look while I’m still getting a paycheck.

At some point in the last two weeks, my laptop became infected with a rather vicious rootkit that installed several viruses.  Yes, I run a firewall and anti-virus and all manner of security software, yet the doggone thing found its way in anyway.  And then it couldn’t be cleaned; it was one of those that digs in so deeply to the operating system that it’s impossible to remove.

When I realized I had to reinstall from scratch, I checked my backups.  Ouch!  The dastardly viruses had infected all of my backups going back to November 2008 (at least it hadn’t yet gotten to the data before then…).  So I wiped out all those backups while planning to make a live backup of the current data in a way that would keep it clean.

That’s when the hard drive failed.  Yes, the new hard drive I installed in my laptop just last November after the original drive perished.  Less than a year after buying the little bugger, it up and dies when I need it most.

Hence, there went my data.  All of it going back to last November at least.  I have hope the drive is intact but that it’s the drive’s internal controller that failed; the warranty should cover it and perhaps I can have it repaired without losing anything.  But data recovery can take a while and I don’t expect to have access to anything for quite some time—if ever.  Only time will tell.

Thankfully I have all of my photos backed up on a separate external drive.  Unfortunately I have no automatic way to filter that content to give me just what I had in my “working” pile: the collection of images I had processed and had wanted to post or otherwise share.  That means I have to copy the data over and go through it again, and process the files again, and try to remember what I thought was worth keeping.

Everything else from last November through now is gone, though; anything new or modified since then is lost, including e-mail, documents (like book manuscripts!), financial records, contact information and so on.

Oh, it gets worse.

Since the rootkit was tracking all activity on the laptop, I have to change every password I have.  Everywhere.  For everything.  Bank accounts, mail accounts, web services, utilities, credit cards, and on and on it goes.  This virus and the various trojans and other malware it installed created a pernicious and devilish breach of security.

After spending several days installing a new drive and bringing the laptop up to some form of usefulness, Sunday afternoon brought yet another fresh bit of suffering.  My air conditioner gave up the ghost.  Dead.  The whole compressor ruined.

Yet I’ll add it couldn’t just die and leave it at that; it had to turn its death into a suicide bombing: when the motor seized up, it ejected the fan at high speed.  The fan came off with such force that it blew off the top of the compressor before gliding right in through two windows in my office (nope, it couldn’t even leave it at one window but instead had to hit two).

Had I been sitting at my desk, the fan would have impaled me right in the chest.  Serious injury or death would have followed, I assure you, for it was traveling with such speed and force that it still embedded itself in the wall after it came through the windows.

Thankfully, The Kids and I were sitting in the living room while I ate a salad and read a book.  The fan and glass caused nothing more serious than a need for major repairs.  Still, what a catastrophe.

Just like the rest of the weekend.

So you’ll pardon me if I’m a bit out of sorts and struggling to get photos posted.  I’ll work through my collection as I can and will rebuild my stash of things to share.  Meanwhile, I have a new job to find, more repairs to complete, plenty of work to do just to get my computer back to a usable form, and a “new” yet failed hard drive to have repaired (hopefully with the data intact).

Weekend from hell?  You betcha!