Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Brain Dead - A Warning from Hell....

Good Morning one and all, the bad news is that my hard drive died on Monday so I have been brainless for the past few days. Now I have my computer back with a brand new hard drive but the stress and the anguish of nearly losing ALL my data, all my work for the last 6, yes 6 years has underlined and bought into focus the prime directive of using these infernal machines - back up, BACK up, BACK UP!!! I’m off to buy myself a 0ne gig memory stick right now!

T’was a saga and a half when my disk died. The techie guy said if they were lucky they would be able to recover the data, they later phoned and said yes they had recovered my data and put it on a disk. But O my, the ONLY file on the disk they gave me was one that had my name, automatically created by the machine, but which I didn’t use! It was full of junk. I quickly phoned them again and told them that the 6 years worth of data was to be found in other files, the ones they hadn’t copied.

Oh, they said, ‘we’ve sent the disk back with the technician and if he sends it of to ‘not Very good computers ltd’ it’ll be lost, crushed, sent off into space or whatever they do with corrupted disks. AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHH, I said.

Anyway the short end of the story is they got the disk back and hopefully have recovered all the data, I haven’t looked yet, because I am off to Bristol shortly and wanted to get this blog done as a warning to you all out there, don’t forget to BACK UP YOUR DATA, it could happen to you in the next 10 minutes!

Anyway here’s a poem I found in a school last night when I was teaching, I thought it was apposite.

Life before computers
An application was for employment
A Program was a TV show
A Cursor use a profanity
And a keyboard was on a piano

Memory was something you lost with age
And a CD was a bank account
And if you had a corrupted disk
It would hurt when you found out

Compress was something you did to garbage
Not something you did to a file
And if you unzipped anything in public
You’d be in jail for a while

Log on was adding wood to a fire
A hard drive was a trip on the road
A mouse pad was where a mouse lived
And a back up happened on the commode

Cutting you did with a pocket knife
Pasting you did with glue
The web was where a spider lived
And a virus was the flu!