i am my hero right now.
the desktop computer has been borked for a few days turning into weeks,
and i’ve been unable to find a way out of the problem. BSOD on startup,
Safe Mode does not work, nothing fucking works. i booted to MEMTEST and
found no errors after 3 passes. i didn’t think it was a hardware problem
to begine with, but you gotta do these things. finally i read up on
another product, whcih i can’t think of the name of now, and after much
reading and planning i decided it was the best approach to salvaging the
data, and eventually wiping the drive and starting the fuck over, or else
just throwing the whole goddam piece of shit into the trash can. it is the
worst computer i ever had, and i blame it mostly on Vista, though the
hardware had its issues too.
at any rate, nothing quite compares to a screen filled with all the stuff
on your file system that you thought sure was wiped out… now that i know
how to do this i might try and salvage an old external drive that has been
sitting in a closet for a couple of years. i don’t know for sure what’s on
it but it might be the hours and hours of audio recordings i made of my
cassette tapes. those vanished after the server blowout of last year, and
that mystified me, since i can’t possibly have put my only copies of those
files on the web server. so maybe the other copies were on this external
drive. i’ll find out, maybe.
it’s a grand and glorious feeling to have salvaged all this, but the joy
is offset by the time wasted getting to this point.
i had most everything i needed backed up to the RAID, and again backed up
to the cloud. but not everything made it, since i disabled all those
services the last few days thinking it might help debug the problems. i
was most in need of restoring a particular Word document and a batch of
WAV files that my gf and i made last week. the wav files for some reason
got written to the internal C drive, and the big Word document did too,
though that’s expected. but the backup and cloud storage were both turned
off, so those last few days of changes could have been lost, and that
would have been very depressing, because it was good stuff, i thought. it
was worth the effort to salvage all the stuff for the sake of that one
file, and that small batch of WAV files. i could have made a few hundred
bucks off this maneuver if someone hired me to do it for their computer.
…..
today i picked up a book at the Amazon Locker on West 57th Street. it was
kind of hilarious, in a way. i doubt i will ever use that service again,
but it was kind of neat to order a book and pick it up in the basement of
a midtown grocery store. you order something and they deliver it to
a locker, and then they mail you a secret code that opens the locker,
revealing your purchase. i bought a book, but in deciding what to get i
found that the service has a lot of obvious limitations. everything i
tried to order at first was unavailable for locker delivery, and with no
specific explanation per item. i guess they were all too big, but i saw
the lockers and the larger ones looked plenty big enough to fit inside the
larger units. maybe those units were already in use. i don’t know, but i
can’t see using this strange-to-me service too often. maybe if i was
homeless i’d find it more useful, but even then, well, that’s why i have a
PO box, as a fallback for homelessness and a lack of address. yeah. and if
i was homeless i don’t know that i’d be making too many orders off
amazon.com anyway. they don’t even take paypal…
…..
i walked to midtown and back. this weather was too perfect for to sit
inside and work, so i just got out there and walked the walk, like old
times, the weather was such crap this summer that i made way fewer of
these rambles than usual. now i am tired, but it is a good and righteous
tired. i slept well last night, for the first time in a long while. i
woke up at 7 and couldn’t believe the redwood between my legs. i haven’t
had that in a while. well, not since the night before, but before that it
had been quite a while since that signal of good health rose up. i
managed to adjust my schedule rather abruptly, from sleeping past noon to
being up before 10. yesterday i was up before 9, wtf is that? what do
people do with all this time in their days?
i noticed that the AM radio programming sounds a lot zestier at that hour.
that’s the drivetime audience, which is their bread and butter, and the
tone of the programming is different. more professional and polished
sounding than the afternoon and evening.
i read once that daylight savings time is known to influence virtually no
known industry or livelihood any more (not even the farmers) but that one
segment of commerce which depends on the sun coming up at an early hour is
the terrestrial radio circuit. their signal depends on atmospheric
conditions, especially sunrise and sunset, and when DST causes 8am to be
the new sunrise then they lose a big chunk of their advertising revenue,
since they can’t go on the air until after the drivetime is over.
or so it was assplained to me. i may have missed some nuances to the
discussion…
then i heard that fishers who depend on the tides and on getting their
stuff to market by a certain time are also influenced by DST.
…..
