Happy Thanksgiving, Eh?
Last night we celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving at the house of Alan, who is Canadian and, not connected to being Canadian, dating my friend Cara but, connected to be Canadian, threw a great Thanksgiving dinner yesterday. There were lots of people there, all wonderfully under the age of 30, and miraculously amidst that group there were two other couples who were married, one couple who were engaged, one couple who are seriously dating, and only one single guy (but he has a serious relationship with the Lord Christ). So all in all, it was a very stable environment to party. That's what you get when you hang around with Christian school-teachers, i guess: Swell folks who marry early; not like all those promiscuous atheists i went to school with. My only quam with the party was that they didn't put out appetizers. Are appetizers traditional for thanksgiving? I just think a dinner party without appetizers equals a room full of hungry people getting too drunk before the food is put out. But that's only a minor quam. Mostly, i had a very excellent time.
Now i am in my store on my day off because our house currently features no computers in working order, and i need to type / write for the first time my grad-school essays which are due at the end of this week. Only one more to write, and then to finish my resume, and then to get them all checked and looked over before sending. I have been procrastinatory up until this point, because i am somewhat ambivalent about entering grad-school this January. If i get in, i will be very happy with it, but if i don't in i may also be happy about it. I don't know. I am quite ambivalent about my life right now. At least being in the store to write my essays did some good; i sold two gold chains and a gold charm to a customer who came pounding on the door. Even on rainy monday holidays, if they can see you inside, they still make you work!
an ounce of prevention is...
An ounce of prevention is... about the same as an ounce of cure, when it comes down to it. The story to go with this moral follows.
The other day one of my hard drives decided it didn't want to talk to the rest of the computer. It was the one that has the music on it, among many other things, so I noticed when the song I was listening to stopped abruptly. We never assume the worst, so first I just restarted the computer, expecting things to be back to normal; no luck. Then I tried to use Apple's Disk Utility to fix things: it managed to repair two of the four partitions on the disk, but didn't have any sucess with the others. Alright... so next I bought an application called DiskWarrior and tried it out: it handled one of the remaining two broken partitions, but couldn't do anything with the last one. Sadly, that last one (which I called 'most things') was the one which contained all my digital photos, all my music, and all the art I had created over the years. Backups? What are they?
So then I turned off the computer for a few days. It wasn't the end of the world; could survive without all those files; I just couldn't face their absence so soon. The loss was still too raw! Today, though, I had to get back to work, and, unwilling to give up, vowed to try harder to recover my data. After considering and rejecting Norton Disk Doctor (I've never seen a program with that many terrible reviews!!) I came across somthing called Data Rescue II. It's not designed to repair broken file systems, but rather to recover data off of crippled disks, and in my case it worked prefectly. Yay! The file system was completely destroyed, but as far as I've been able to determine every bit of the data emerged unscathed.
All in all, I spent about $180 to get it all back: $80 on DiskWarrior and $100 on Data Rescue II. Now I bet you're thinking, I could have got some kind of a reasonable backup system, firewire hard drive or whatever; sure, but this works too, right? Everything is nearly back to normal now! And I still have the restore aps in case things go wrong again!
No really, I'm probably going to invest in some sort of backup capability in the near future. But I am also very happy to have escaped with so little long-term pain!