Friday Post 1: Bloody Evil Bloody Hell

This is actually Thursday's entry, but I haven't been able to write it for a while, because, well, my computer gakked quite fantastically.

I shall start at the beginning. I had just uploaded the Portuguese version of the Crow book (w00t!) and was trying to edit the title page of the Pig book for the Swedish edition (w00t again!) when I found that Illustrator wouldn't open. Funny that. So I see where it crashes, and it's when it's trying to optimize the font list. Aha, say I. Corrupt fonts. Easy to fix. I crack open my font manager, go on a hunt, and discover a lot of my system fonts have duplicated themselves multiple times.

If I were smart, I would've known this was going to turn out badly.

I ran fsck on the disk and was happy to discover an error message I've never seen before. It's so exotic I can't even write it here, because I have no recollection what it was. But the advice from the Google was quite clear: backup backup backup and re-install!

I know backing up is good practice, and I do do it quite a lot, but I have a 70GB drive in my laptop and don't have a clean 70GB anywhere else in my home, so doing a full backup wasn't something I was going to be able to do. I was deathly afraid if I tried to run the bit-by-bit backups like I usually do, I'd lose all my stuff somewhere in the middle. I had to do it right, and do it right away.

So I ran out to London Drugs and went on a hunt for a 70GB+ HD that I could use. $200 for 100GB, sometimes $300. LaCie has great drives, some of which look like Lego, but geez, I don't want to spend $3/GB for a drive I can stack, cause at that price I'm not going to but enough to stack anyway.

Then I see it: Iogear drive for $115. 160GB. I bring it to the counter with my new copy of OS 10.4 (long somewhat incriminating story) and the guy at the counter says at least four times "Wow, that's a really great price!". I could probably get a cheaper one online, I guess, but I really wasn't expecting to get that much space for that little money in a time of crisis. So I was happy.

I spent all last night trying to pick apart the files that I could recover vs the ones I couldn't. My OS is mostly wasted, but my fonts (the good ones) survived. My documents are safe too. Mail is always backed up, thank god. But now I have to wait for the disk utils to do their work, so I'm offline all day today while I rebuild my life.

A friend of mine said our computers are like our hearts or our kidneys or our heads. When they have problems, it's just as bad as when you have a migraine or a heartache or a kidney problem. I tend to agree, but in at least two of those cases, you can take strong painkillers to numb the pain. If I took Percocet now I'd just look like a drug addict. More like a drug addict.

So yes. My day is screwed up. But since my wife is away most of the day and her computer is in good condition, I can write in my blog a lot! Yay for me!

Or. Well. Something.