Dug spent a good few hours today getting my computer back to life. Now I'm cracking on with marking again. Meanwhile, an author who's working on the encyclopedia emailed to say that his computer crashed on him a couple of days ago. He's based in Jakarta and has been travelling in Sumatra where the tsunami hit. Which kind of puts the panic over a linguistics encyclopedia entry into perspective. He was pleased to hear that I was in a similar situation. He then freaked himself out by making this comment:

'But if you hear a news flash of a meteorite smashing into Jakarta, you'll know
it's my encyclopaedia jinx again.'

and then waking up in the morning to find that there had been an earthquake in Jakarta that night (too small to notice, luckily). Hero that he is, he's now typed up the article that he had a hard copy of and also completely rewritten the one that was totally lost. Wish I was working that quickly.

Meanwhile, one of Apoa's friends just came round with her parents to apologise for telling stories that weren't true about relatives being missing in the tsunami. Apparently, during World War II, they did have a relative who was missing for a week after Sri Lanka was bombed and then turned up safe and sound.

B-}