A Technical Hiatus

It's been one of those weeks – not just the profound joy of exam week & exam grading, but Tuesday night the hard drive of the computer just up & died – rather spectacularly, with a sound like (as my mother would say) a "dying calf in a thunderstorm." I'd been hearing that sound intermittently for a few days, so I had every last damned thing backed up.

So the short version is that I've got myself a brand new computer, and have moved up to the next generation of the Macintosh OSX – Tiger, I think it is, replacing Panther or Jaguar or Tabby or some damn thing. And it's pretty cool (been using it in the office for a few months now already). Just one glitch: The Mac email program (called, rather flamboyantly, "Mail") has apparently changed their method of saving messages over this last update; useta be they would save a mailbox as a single ".mbox" file; now they save every single message as a separate ".emlx" file. What difference does this make? (After all, as far as I know computers run by sorcery anyway – cf. Fredric Jameson on our inability to understand our technology paralleling our inability to grasp the global economy...) Well, in short the new, Tigerish "Mail" seems unable to understand the old Manx Cat "Mail" – it just won't import those damned mailboxes – and at least for the nonce I seem to have lost about seven years worth of email files.

So, if you've ever sent me an email in your life, I'd much appreciate it if you'd send me another one so I can start building that address book back up again. (Especially you, John, since now I've lost your snailmail address...)