All Hail the Emp. Peng.

I upgraded my laptop's operating system to Ubuntu 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon (as a rabid penguinophile, of course I use Linux). I'll blame user stupidity rather than the penguin for the installation problems. Something in the initial download and install failed, leaving me with a computer that would not boot. Worst of all, it was a computer that wouldn't boot and contained all of my recent work. I've learned my lesson and will never go mucking around the operating system without backing up the data again.

I spent the better part of Friday desperate to get the laptop to boot again. I made two live boot disks (for the less geeky readers, a live boot disk allows you to boot the computer from a CD without touching the existing operating system, or in my case, lack of existing operating system). Both of my boot disks failed, owing to human error in the burn process since burning a boot disk is somewhat more complicated than burning a music or data backup CD. I was at the point of considering what I would need to break open the laptop, pull the drive and hitch it to a working computer. As I told one person, "I don't care if the laptop breathes again; I just need my files."

Emp. Peng. to the rescue. He was away overnight for business when this happened, and called 12 hours into my ordeal. Using his new iPhone somewhere near the Appalachians, he found the appropriate Unix command-line code to burn the boot CD properly and walked me through the correct burn process. That got me a functional boot CD, but I still spent the next three hours in a fruitless and increasingly desperate search for my files while Emp. Peng. was on his way home to rescue his penguin in distress.

I should explain that Emp. Peng., computer guru though he may be, doesn't spend a lot of time around Linux. Going Penguin was my thing, and it is so far confined to my laptop here at the Rookery. Emp. Peng. has rarely had the occasion to get into my laptop. Still, when he got home, and found me still distraught over the missing files, he took a crack at my laptop to see if he could track them down. I handed him the laptop that had caused me most of a full day's consternation. Twenty seconds later, he had my files pulled up.