January 26, 1998

Not A Good Weekend

I'm hoping this means my biorhythms have an uptick in the future. The NEAR future.

I lost Nero yesterday. Well, it's more like Nero lost itself: the b-tree got trashed, the first quarter of the disk got written over with $FFFFFFs, it was a bad scene. It's the first unrecoverable software error I've ever had with a computer, at least that I can remember. There have been a few hardware ones. But not software.

The upshot was that even Darin couldn't fix it. That's how bad it was.

Guess when the last time I backed up was? Yes, you guessed it! When Donut became Nero. That is, six months ago.

I lost everything from the last six months. In the case of a few things, that's okay; in the case of my thesis script, my other electronic copies of scripts, my mail file...well, in a phrase, it sucketh.

We did the total wipe and the total rebuild. It took me hours to set up the minimum configuration of files I thought I need, and I still had a major disk error this morning. (Luckily, this time Norton Utilities could fix it, instead of cutting the b-tree into shreds and casting them away, the way it did yesterday.)

I spent several hours today typing in my thesis script again. Well, the pages I had, at any rate. I got to line-edit as I went along, so I guess the time wasn't a total loss. I did cut 3 pages that way.

Darin ordered me Retrospect Remote, so I can use his tape drives from my machine. Whee.

Note: If you've sent me mail recently and I haven't gotten around to responding to it...well, I'm not gonna. So you're going to have to send it again, I'm afraid. I'm sorry. Honest I am. This hurts me worse than it hurts you.