I've been in Mar del Plata for a few days now. Things have been busy, so I haven't had a chance to do any blogging, do any sightseeing or much of anything but eat tons of beef (do they serve anything else in Argentinian supperhouses?) and sit in back-to-back and seemingly endless meetings.

I've also been without a computer for 24 hours now. During yesterdays WSIS Workshop my computer froze. Its been doing this off and on for the last couple of weeks and seems to fix itself with a reboot. It actually hasn't happened frequently enough for me to worry about having to diagnose and fix it. I haven't lost any work, and its only happened a handful of times.

Yesterday's freeze was a little bit different though.

This time, my computer failed to restart when I rebooted. I mean, it would start to load Windows, but couldn't load "Wup.sys" (Windows user partition?) - which caused a critical loading failure that Windows couldn't recover from.

Translation: Something got scrambled and I can't turn my computer on.

I managed to borrow a Windows installation disk, but was only able to find out that the filesystem has been completely screwed up. The Windows installation only gave me two options - reformat the drive and lose all my data, or delete the offending partition and lose all my data. Not terribly good options.

I've put the word out that I could benefit from some enhanced disk diagnostics tools. For those of you playing along at home, please keep your fingers crossed for me :)

The upside is that I didn't actually lose all that much in terms of data. I've recently started sync'ing my drive with my workstation at the office, so I expect that I only lost those things that I've created since I left - a few documents and one hundred, mostly uninteresting, photographs.

James Woods was nice enough to lend me his Powerbook to do some work and write this blog entry. Its digging into my wrist. I prefer to have my keyboard closer to the front of the notebook than the Powerbook. I'd die of RSI if I actually used one of these on a fulltime basis.

But I appreciate the brief time I've got to check some email and do some light blogging! :)