Filling in

It seems that MS Word did not decide to save the four pages of my tech report last night, after all. So I'm starting over. I'm calmer now, and can probably stay sane as I work through it.

Benj, thank you for understanding and giving me space; you're free to come back to the room now.

Robin, thank you for being here for me to cry on, and in advance for staying up with me through this long night.

Steph, thank you for listening to me whine about my technical issues and at least trying to find a way around them.

After I reach four pages, Robin and I will be going to Denny's. If you might want to come along, leave a comment and then be on AIM. If I see a comment, and see that you're still up, I may invite you along.

So: Au travail.

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Afterthought: Once this is done, I'm going to steal some Red Hat or other Linux CDs from someone, wipe my Windows recovery partition, and have 15 GB available for a stable OS. Either that, or just download and learn Open Office.

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(no subject)

I am now approximately back to where I was before I lost everything, only about two hours after I realized I lost it.

So I can take a break.

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What I'm up to

My issues with Word this week, along with some other weird things that my desktop has been doing, have opened my eyes to the fact that it has been running nearly continuously, with very little maintenance, for over a year and a half. I have more faith in Windows than the average Eastie, yes, but I'm not stupid. I know that systems get corrupted and need to be repaired. So, I'm using my still-legal demo copy of Nero to back of everything that might be even a small pain in the ass to replace, the bulk of this being a hundred and fifty hours of assorted random music. I have a stack of CDs, graciously borrowed from Mikel, and the desktop is in isolation until its critical components are transfered to said CDs. It's unplugged from the network, every unimportant application shut down, doing nothing but backup while my laptop sits greedily lapping up the fast ethernet.

The optimal architecture I'd want for my desktop would be as follows. Two twenty-gig bootable partitions for system-specific files, one with Windows and games, the other with Linux and important stuff. The other forty gigabytes would contain non-OS-specific data such as music, movies, and the like, and would be accessible by whichever OS I happen to be running under at the time. I honestly have no idea if this is feasible or remotely possible, but in a perfect world it would be, and it would be on my computer.

So - next chance I get, I need a few things. First, a stack of CDs to reimburse Mikel for the loan. Second, a CD carrier to keep them in that's not just a stack.

Yes, I survived the week. No, I'm not out of the woods yet. I have a stems lab and an E&M lab, plus E&M homework, and we should probably start working on the group project for Restivo's class. But it's over the hump, now, so I'm going to live.

I feel like wandering and being vaguely social. I actually don't feel quite like I only had three hours of sleep, oddly enough.

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GRAR!

Evidently, Nero's idea of 'back up all this onto CDs' is more along the lines of my idea of 'back up 30 of 35 cds, catch an error on #32 and instead of asking for a new cd to try again, cancel the job'.

So I have 31 cds of backup, and I'm missing 4 cds worth. I just have to figure out what 3G of stuff I still need to write to a cd.

Fuckers.

And apparently the file that says what parts of what are where always goes on the LAST cd in the set. So anything that's now in, you know, two parts, is irretrievable.

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