Hard disk, hard times

Last night my laptop, which had been getting slower and slower and s-l-o-w-er lately, decided to die on me. We went to Staples this morning, which had a bunch on sale because of Windows 8, and bought a new one. They are trying to recover and transfer data from the old one, but it will be middle of next week before I learn anything. Fortunately I back up a lot of things, including the autobiographical stuff I am writing. At worst, I think I will lose what I wrote yesterday.

There are other things I may lose, but I don't think anything of great importance that cannot be reproduced from hard copies. We will see.

Meanwhile, I am using Tom's laptop to fill in.

And just to give you something else to ponder, did you know that if you drive 10 miles to buy a lottery ticket, statistically speaking you're more likely to be killed in a car accident than win the jackpot?

Get yourself a piggy bank, tuck those dollars in there every week instead of buying lottery tickets, and at the end of the year, treat yourself or someone you love to something nice.

Your call, of course.

I read that a statistician had run the odds and it turns out your chances of winning big in the lottery are almost exactly the same, whether you buy a ticket or not.