Sometimes I wish I were more of a geek. I'm trying to geek out with my old Western Digital 500 GB My Book external hard drive that began to make the "click of death" that I wasn't informed enough to recognize about six months ago, and which just stopped working altogether about a month and a half ago. (Apparently, I learn now, WD drives have a pretty bad reputation among some folks -- See Markwilson and even Wikipedia. Of course they had great reviews when I shelled out the grant money for it back when I thought it would be a reliable place to keep my data.)

I've gotten as far as pulling the plastic casing away and I have lots of screws and screwdrivers and pieces of sticky foil tape and cables and green electronic plates all around, thanks to my own prowess and some guidance from Ransackery.

But here I am with the core metal box of the external drive now, and a whole lot of questions about SATA, and not enough confidence to open up my brand-new Dell desktop to make an internal connection between my computer and this second drive. I think I will have to shell out for a data recovery specialist, and hopefully they will be able to get at all the material contained in this little thing.

I have a similar set of issues with my old wireless router, which served me well for several years, but which I started a small fire in last week when I accidentally connected the AC power adapter for the Vonage telephone adapter to the router. I blew out the lapping flames inside, and the smoke subsided, and when I plugged in the correct cable, I had a surprising and exhilarating moment of the power lights coming up before the whole thing went completely dead. So, with the help of a friend, I opened up the thing, and he identified the one single part that got fried in the process, and it's possible that I might be able to solder a small piece of lamp wire into the thing to get it up and running again. But alas, I have no soldering iron (yes, even this daughter of an engineer), and so will probably end up ordering another unit, perpetuating the coal-fueled consumer goods industry in China that my mother says is the biggest culprit behind Bay Area air pollution (thanks to the winds across the Pacific). And this thing, which may have only a half-inch of "problem" will likely end up in a landfill.

Yeah, that thing I said earlier about the losses and gains of modern life . . .? Dealing with compatibility issues and data loss, consumption, pollution, and the world system always brings me back to that set of questions. Now where'd I put my antidepressants?