Going Pete Tong

It's all going Pete Tong, as the kids say, (although I can't really see 'Pete Tong' being any kind of cultural reference point for contemporary kids, but there you are).  What's going wrong is all the IT stuff.  I was up until the early hours last night trying to solve a problem which temporarily took The Sleaze off line.  It turned out to be the latest update of the 'Jetpack' plugin which was causing the problems, (Automattic, who are behind the plugin still haven't offered any explanation for why the update caused this problem on some sites. In fact, they haven't even acknowledged that there is a problem, in spite of the various queries appearing on their help forum).   The problem, however, was easily solvable: I reverted back to the plugin's previous version (removing it completely would have taken some functionality from the site).  Which is more than can be said for my current problem: my laptop is refusing to boot.  Now, this isn't as crippling a problem as it might have been as, fortuitously, I took possession of my new laptop on Monday.

This means that I still have access to the web and can create content (like this post), but it means that I've lost all of my data, which is now locked down on the old laptop's hard drive.  I say all, I still have some of it stored on other media, including the cloud.  But it is bloody inconvenient - right now I can't access any of the video elements from which I edit together my movies and all of my sound files I use for podcasting have gone.  I know that the hard drive of the old laptop was showing some signs of failure (hence the purchase of this replacement), but there was absolutely no warning of this latest development.  I was hoping for a gradual transition between machines, but right now that is impossible.  Damn it, I hadn't even finished setting this laptop up properly.  The one consolation is that I'm unlikely to have similar problems with this new machine as it has a solid state drive, which is less prone to the sort of damage and corruption which afflicts conventional hard drives.  It also means that it doesn't get hot, which is a real boon.

The old laptop might not be a complete write off.  There is a possibility that I might be able to boot it with a recovery disk, in which case my priority would simply be to recover as much data from it as possible.  We'll see.