Aargh

External 500 GB hard drive just crashed.

Most of the data are either expendable or reproducible. But still.

Aargh.

Update, Sunday daylight: CHKDSK finished just as I woke up this morning and I have use of the drive again, but I don't know how much has been lost. I'm running CHKDSK again to see if it can do any more cleanup.

Oh, and: I'm #3!

With this year's defeat, I am now the undisputed #3 on the list of people with the most Hugo Award nominations with no victory (behind Stan Schmidt and fellow NYRSF editor Kathryn Cramer).

It tastes footnotey.

Thanks, I needed that

Shamus Young is a gamer nerd whose sense of humor matches mine, except, you know, funnier.

Here's a video he did a couple of years ago using screen capture video from Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, a game in which you build amusement parks. I laughed and laughed and laughed because I am a bad, bad person.

( You must be THIS cruel to enter )

Saturn is, indeed, in retrograde

As my beloved nellorat mentions on her own journal, her mother has entered the final stage of her long decline out of health (after a long and accomplished and storied life). We got two phone calls from nellorat's sisters indicating that if she wanted to see her mother alive, today would be the day to come in, so we dropped everything, grabbed the only reasonable flight ticket available, and took her to the airport to put her on a plane. (Both supergee and I are faced with inflexible work deadlines that prevent us from accompanying her.)

The flight was out of White Plains airport at 5:59. I was very proud of my leet driving skillz for getting her there full half-hour before her flight. I was no more than five minutes gone from the dropoff when my cell phone rang: it was, of course, nellorat; her flight had been canceled because of severe storms at Philadelphia, the regional hub through which she was being channeled. I rushed back and joined her in line for what was, it turns out, the "ineffective complaints" desk. White Plains is a small airport, and no other flights were available, at all, at all. In fact, no other flights were available at LaGuardia, JFK, or Newark--all the airlines are running as close to completely full as possible, and of course a Sunday night in the middle of the summer is going to have the least flexibility.

So we came home. She's flying tomorrow--a five-hour flight (counting stopover) instead of the three hours it should have taken tonight. It's just a bad situation all around.

When the Fisher King is corrupted, the whole land suffers.

Edited to add: nellorat's mother died late Sunday evening. nellorat finally arrived in Michigan late Monday afternoon after much more difficulty thanks to the airlines.