Disaster strikes

What's the worst that could happen to a virtual vagabond in Sicily?

Well, you could be collateral damage in a Mafia vendetta, I suppose, but that seems a remote possibility here in quiet Siracusa, where there is apparently little mob action. (The epicentre is Palermo, of course.) You could get very sick or hit by a car, but the local medical system is reputedly good and we have insurance.

You could lose your Internet service. Now there's a scary thought. But the service is local, the supplier, Telecom Italia, reputable. And if it ever did go out, a call to our ever accommodating landlord Giorgio would I'm sure have it back working in no time.

Nope, the worst would be a broken computer, which is what I have. My 9-month-old Dell XPS 1330, one of Dell's top-of-the-line super-light notebooks, died yesterday. It had been in ailing health for a couple of days.

A Dell tech support agent on the phone from Canada took about two minutes to determine, based on the fairly unequivocal symptoms, that it was well and truly kaput and would have to go into the depot for a transplant, probably the motherboard. But no problem, this would all be covered under warranty.

Then it took about four minutes on hold to determine that, no, Dell could not pick up from Italy and deliver back here. So there you have it. Shit out of luck, until I'm back in Canada next month.

It could be a lot worse. We do have a second computer on the trip, an older Dell Inspiron 640m that the VP Finance has been using. We're now sharing it. I do have the most vital data backed up online. I can recover, am in the process now - very slow as it turns out.

The backup copy of my enormous Outlook file - the holy of holies - is a few days out of date thanks to the vagaries of the Fabrik Ultimate Backup service I'm using and my own lack of vigilance. But all the e-mails were saved on the Rogers/Yahoo mail server, so I expect to be able to reconstruct my calendar and avoid missing scheduled teleconferences. And I expect to be able to recover all the Word documents in which I store notes for articles I'm writing and digital recordings of interviews. Touch wood.

Still, it is a major set-back. I'm sure to have forgotten to back up some data that I will need, or at least miss. Did I back up my Internet favourites, for example? Can't remember. While I won't lose any photos - backed up locally on a portable drive and on the camera card - I may lose hundreds of edited versions of images if the hard drive on the XPS 1330 doesn't make it through the surgery back home.

The Dell Inspiron is also slow and prone to lock-ups and crashing. The VP Finance on any given day can spend several hours on the computer, which she won't be able to do now. It could be a lot better too.