Now the tale can be told of how one woman running Linux, alone in the wilds of Windowsland, survived a boot sector crash. Bear with me; I have a Friday recommend. Skip this bit, if you don’t speak geek.

Yes, children, for the past week or so, I’ve been updating through my laptop because my trusty Linux desktop would not load. Tried restarting. Tried turning it totally off then on. Could it boot in safe mode? Yes, it could, so the hard drive wasn’t toasted.

Tried ootching in the back door through the command prompt and deleting some files, since one of the FAILED messages I was getting said that there was 0 capacity on /. Did not work. Tried popping the install software in and running repair. Did not fix. Tried updating from the install software. Did not fix. Finally had to call it a fresh install, keeping existing partitions. WORKED!

So I’m back in business, slowly learning what I need to retweak to get it back to what it was. Flash doesn’t work now, for instance, so I have to go find that. You know–stuff.

Now FRIDAY RECOMMEND: If you’re nice in your language, you might not like this site. I just discovered it for myself, and I think it’s brilliant. It’s called Terrible Minds, and this is a brilliant post about why you don’t want to be a writer. Really. Like the man says, “Save yourself.”

WRITING PROMPT: Are you not listening? How can I give you a writing prompt when I just WARNED you? Oh, all right: A character warns another character against doing something, to no avail. Does it turn out well or ill?

MA