Matthew's Journal

I'm writing this post to salute a fallen soldier. Today, Saturday the 18th of of October, my noble laptop, dubbed Argon, suffered a hard drive failure and can no longer answer the call of duty or the call to process radar data. All I'm left with now is my other noble laptop, Neon.

This situation is the exact reason we bring redundant equipment into the field. I can't just run to Best Buy or order a replacement part from New Egg. FedEx, despite their nearly global reach, doesn't offer a service to bring shipments to moving vessels in the open ocean. I'm going to work with the electronics technician on the ship to see if I can recover some files from the failed hard drive. All our instrument data is safely backed up on external hard drives, but I have some scripts I wrote that I didn't backup to alternate locations. Those scripts automate some of my tasks and make my life easier. As you can imagine, I'd like to extract them from the failed hard drive so I don't have to spend time rewriting them. The loss of Argon means that I'm now restricted to working on one laptop so my ability to multitask is impaired. It's nice being able to do something on one computer while the other one is busy executing a task that you ought to let it do alone without trying to run several applications on top of that.

Anyway, when Jake takes my place for leg 2 of the VOCALS cruise in Arica, we should be able to resurrect Argon if he brings a new hard drive.

But I'm not dead yet!

Update: It would seem that Argon isn't as dead as it first appeared. This morning I put the HDD from Argon into Neon and everything worked. So, I put the HDD back into Argon and everything still worked. The only thing I can think of as changing between yesterday afternoon and this morning is heat. I'm going to keep an eye on things and see what I can do to prevent a reoccurrence of death.

Update 2: Argon locked up again after about 40 minutes of use. If it's only going to work for short periods I'm going to take it out of use.