(no subject)

Okay, fuck that WinXP shite. I mean just fuck it up its st00pid arse. See, this is what happened. I plug in the disc and tell it to do the upgrade. It says that Easy CD Creator 5 won't work under XP but I know this is no problem since XP has some built-in functionality for data CD writing and I'll figure out something else for audio CDs if I need to. So I say, go! And it copies a bunch of files, and inspects the config and restarts a couple times as is normal for a Windows install. Then, at "34 minutes estimated remaining" and in the middle of "Installing devices" (leastways that's what the progress bar was labelled at that point), it just hangs. Dead. No mouse movement, the little animated squares in the bottom right hand corner stop moving. Great, says me. Press reset. After restarting it tries to pick up where it left off. Repeat this about three times. At this point I say "okay, screw it, do a fresh install, I'll just lose my settings and all." No dice; same thing happens.

So I try to repair my Win2K install so I can boot from it again. Of course, unlike doing it right off under Win98, I had never made a boot/recovery disk. So I can't do the "emergency repair" stuff. So I try recovery console. It tells me the password I am entering is not the administrator password. Bloody hell. Okay... so I install a fresh Win2K install on D:. In this way I get the computer at least running, and copy the contents of My Documents and suchlike from C: onto D: for safekeeping. I then delete the botched WINNT folder on that drive and install it afresh on C:. So now I've spent about 6 hours so far today reinstalling software (since most of it has to exist in the registry to run) and downloading and installing Windows Update stuff (since that set me back to not having Service Pack 4, IE 6, etc).

That leaves out the hours I spent last night trying to get Windows to re-recognize my modem, in a repeat of the exact problem I had when I upgraded to Win2K in the first place, but I won't go into the details of that because the way I finally succeeded early this afternoon was in a fairly random and desperate fashion.

But, overall rating: I won't &#^&!^!ing be trying THAT again. >_

(no subject)

Dumb Mistake of the Day:

I was copying things back over into the new My Documents from my D: mirror. I moved the file folders one by one, being careful not to miss any. I looked at them side by side and made sure every one was duplicated. Then I deleted the "spare" My Documents and after some other tidying up, emptied the Recycle Bin.

Then, a short while ago when I went to open something from the folder, I realized the Dumb Mistake. I had taken pains to triple-check that I hadn't missed any folders, yes. But I forgot to copy all the files that were just "loose" in the main My Documents level. Norton couldn't find any fragments to unerase, "recover" only works on NTFS volumes (doh!), and you can't "restore" once you've deleted. Well fark. I don't recall all the contents of the folder, although it wasn't terribly much, maybe forty files or so.

A good deal of it can't be reconstructed, but either I don't think I would need it anymore anyway, or it's just not that important and I'll have to let it go: stuff referring to an auto accident now past its time limit of mattering to my insurance company, some semi-technical information about different kinds of opiate drugs, two paper letters to enotsola from around 1999 or 2000.

Some of it I can find again or recreate, although with some annoyance: my expenses spreadsheet, PDFs of film development info for certain films, my current resume and references, my templates for glamourbomb papers in half-sheet, quarter-sheet, and sixteenth-sheet "slip" sizes. I've also lost the current queue of things to put in the Faery Miscellany, but I think some of that can be reconstructed by digging into the sidhelist archives a little ways for some Silver Elves stuff, and trawling back through the otherkin posts until I come across a request I made for material, and following the threads there (hopefully to the same stuff I found before). I didn't have a whole lot built up so I don't think it's a big loss, although it's going to be a bit of a pain.

Some of it I can't recreate and am pretty put out about: a file of words I'd glossed in a kind of "faery" or "elven" language; the fairly extensive dictionary and detailed grammar rules for an alien language I'd made up; a file full of recipes for "cakes" such as one would use in a Pagan ritual. These make me go grr, but I suppose I'll live.

But then there's a couple of things I can't recreate and that just make me want to smack my forehead against a handy object:

• A Word document about two pages long containing all the passwords for everything I need a login and password for. I used to keep a hardcopy printed out, but over time got annoyed with having to refer to it and thought that just opening the file whenever I needed it was easier. (Yes, I know this isn't terribly secure.) I've done my best to memory-dump, but a good deal of it is lost to the mists of time. On the bright side, there are some I recall not ever having used past the time I set them up in the first place (so why write them down? I dunno) and others have sort of gone obsolete over time, so maybe I don't need them so badly anymore, whereas the ones I actually use tend to have still been in my head. So overall, I guess I didn't lose THAT much, but it's still worrisome.


• A massive Excel spreadsheet containing all the music, movies, and books I want to get my hands on, books divided into "low" and "high" priority for a total of some four or five hundred lines. This really makes me want to cry, as there's no damn way I'm going to be able to recreate this (maybe over time, but not anywhen soon, since it was a months-long gradual compilation in the first place). There was a time when all the "high" ones were in my Amazon wishlist as a kind of backup, but then my boss said that she had found that I had one and I hurriedly removed a lot of the contents and hadn't ever gotten around to putting them back.


• My lovely, huge quotefile. My hundreds of pages long quotefile. My quotefile that's grown over the years from being an actual handwritten notebook in the early 1990s. Argh. I can't even find the words for what kind of loss of effort this is. Never mind banging the head, I think I need something much more drastic. :(

All in all this has been a crappy weekend.

(no subject)

Dumb Mistake of the Day:

I was copying things back over into the new My Documents from my D: mirror. I moved the file folders one by one, being careful not to miss any. I looked at them side by side and made sure every one was duplicated. Then I deleted the "spare" My Documents and after some other tidying up, emptied the Recycle Bin.

Then, a short while ago when I went to open something from the folder, I realized the Dumb Mistake. I had taken pains to triple-check that I hadn't missed any folders, yes. But I forgot to copy all the files that were just "loose" in the main My Documents level. Norton couldn't find any fragments to unerase, "recover" only works on NTFS volumes (doh!), and you can't "restore" once you've deleted. Well fark. I don't recall all the contents of the folder, although it wasn't terribly much, maybe forty files or so.

A good deal of it can't be reconstructed, but either I don't think I would need it anymore anyway, or it's just not that important and I'll have to let it go: stuff referring to an auto accident now past its time limit of mattering to my insurance company, some semi-technical information about different kinds of opiate drugs, two paper letters to enotsola from around 1999 or 2000.

Some of it I can find again or recreate, although with some annoyance: my expenses spreadsheet, PDFs of film development info for certain films, my current resume and references, my templates for glamourbomb papers in half-sheet, quarter-sheet, and sixteenth-sheet "slip" sizes. I've also lost the current queue of things to put in the Faery Miscellany, but I think some of that can be reconstructed by digging into the sidhelist archives a little ways for some Silver Elves stuff, and trawling back through the otherkin posts until I come across a request I made for material, and following the threads there (hopefully to the same stuff I found before). I didn't have a whole lot built up so I don't think it's a big loss, although it's going to be a bit of a pain.

Some of it I can't recreate and am pretty put out about: a file of words I'd glossed in a kind of "faery" or "elven" language; the fairly extensive dictionary and detailed grammar rules for an alien language I'd made up; a file full of recipes for "cakes" such as one would use in a Pagan ritual. These make me go grr, but I suppose I'll live.

But then there's a couple of things I can't recreate and that just make me want to smack my forehead against a handy object:

• A Word document about two pages long containing all the passwords for everything I need a login and password for. I used to keep a hardcopy printed out, but over time got annoyed with having to refer to it and thought that just opening the file whenever I needed it was easier. (Yes, I know this isn't terribly secure.) I've done my best to memory-dump, but a good deal of it is lost to the mists of time. On the bright side, there are some I recall not ever having used past the time I set them up in the first place (so why write them down? I dunno) and others have sort of gone obsolete over time, so maybe I don't need them so badly anymore, whereas the ones I actually use tend to have still been in my head. So overall, I guess I didn't lose THAT much, but it's still worrisome.


• A massive Excel spreadsheet containing all the music, movies, and books I want to get my hands on, books divided into "low" and "high" priority for a total of some four or five hundred lines. This really makes me want to cry, as there's no damn way I'm going to be able to recreate this (maybe over time, but not anywhen soon, since it was a months-long gradual compilation in the first place). There was a time when all the "high" ones were in my Amazon wishlist as a kind of backup, but then my boss said that she had found that I had one and I hurriedly removed a lot of the contents and hadn't ever gotten around to putting them back.


• My lovely, huge quotefile. My hundreds of pages long quotefile. My quotefile that's grown over the years from being an actual handwritten notebook in the early 1990s. Argh. I can't even find the words for what kind of loss of effort this is. Never mind banging the head, I think I need something much more drastic. :(

All in all this has been a crappy weekend.