Alia Luria

This week will forever mark in my mind the shocking and horrifying event of my Macbook’s hard drive failing spectacularly. I have always known that backing up data was important. And, I always intended to start doing it. Well, I really should have. This past Saturday, not even 4 hours after getting back from the Caribbean, my hard drive had a massive mechanical failure. I was not able to get it to a repair specialist until Monday… but I had held out the hope that my data would be salvageable, as I had run a hardware check on the machine, and it had come back okay. So, taking my drive to Save Your Mac, which I highly recommend, I had every hope that my data would be recovered and machine restored.

It was not to be however. Steve at Save Your Mac tried to load the data up on a gadget that reads the drive directly, using Disk Warrior. However, he could not even get the disk to mount or read at all. After about 10 minutes of nothing but a horrible clicking noise, we had to throw in the towel. So, I tried not to have a total panic attack inside the repair shop. He referred me to some disk recovery specialists, which I will be enlisting to help me recover the data. They will have to use some crazy expensive techniques, but hopefully the results will be worth the expenditure.

In the meantime, I am typing this from an almost empty, brand new hard drive. Eventually, I will get my cruise photos up for people to enjoy.

I’m truly excited about getting to live in Japan for 4 or so months, but I have started to have a lot of nerves associated with it. Will I be able to find a decent apartment while I’m still here in the U.S.? What’s a decent apartment? What’s me getting ripped off? What if I sign a contract with a place and then find that I haven’t thought of a particularly important provision? I could go on like this for hours, and I probably have already in my own brain. Yay, neuroses! All of this is compounded by the fact that school keeps me busy.

I need to make things easier for myself by keeping detailed lists of stuff and print out interesting/important information and starting a file with it. At least I’ve gotten all outstanding (as of now) documents to TUJ, including the most important visa documentation. So, I’m really only waiting on the course registration materials, the job guide, the housing guides, and the temporary housing registration (which I hope to not have to take advantage of). I can save myself $300 at least by not taking advantage of the temporary housing. If I find an apartment here, I won’t have to pay $700+ for two weeks of housing in Tokyo and then have the stress of looking for an apartment while I’m already there. Also, many of the places I’ve looked over in a cursory manner have only had a $300 deposit to hold the apartment, which they will usually accept as a credit card payment.

Also, it’s good that flights seem to still be available, and the prices I’m seeing right now are $967 including tax. David and I still haven’t decided the exact dates we are going to return, but it does not look like my summer job will be starting until the second half of May, so hopefully I will have a week to try to recover from jetlag (which I’m sure will be pretty serious after 4 months). After they have processed my documents, I may call the recruiting office see if I can get a date locked down.

Blarg, so much to do, so little relative time in which to do it.