JonathanLB
Jul 24th, 2002, 11:19:34 PM
Well, as most of you already know it has been a rough time for me personally for quite some time now. About 15 months and 3 weeks if you want to be exact about it.
I mean, the number of things that have gone wrong within that period is shocking. Regardless of living in a nice house or any of that other superficial nonsense, things have been far from even decent or acceptable.
I was pretty depressed last night about my best friend not even talking to me in five days and he just spends all his time with his girlfriend and work. Not like last summer, when we did everything together. Anyway, it was a bad night. I of course thought it couldn't get much worse, and every time I think that, it does.
Today, I woke up to a hard disk drive that is simply not going to work ever again. I have lost hundreds of hours of work, everything I was doing for the last few weeks, tons of Star Wars images, trailers, personal pictures from Hawaii, password files, access codes to forums, bookmarks to important places online (freelance writing job sites, collectible sites), a list I made of my DVD collection, all of my freelance articles are lost I believe, 500+ MP3s that made up basically every song I really wanted to have that took me forever to assemble because my lousy Internet connection speed. It's all gone. A lot of my life was on that computer, and although I'm not so gullible as not to back up my key files, still, a lot of this stuff I had simply never bothered to backup because I had so many gigs of information. I had video files that I was editing with my friend for several days, which are now totally lost.
The only things I have are every file that is on my server, like my movie reviews are all accessible somehow, but not in Word format. I have lost printable versions of every single review I have except for a few I wrote in Hawaii. I lost about 10 hours of work I put into the site that hadn't been updated. I didn't lose any reviews, though, don't think I lost even one of those because they are up online. I can put them back into Word and it would take forever, though. I have copies of my books, like the final manuscript copy of Anticipation, in print (x2), on disk (x1), and on my laptop (x1). So obviously something as precious as that is well preserved. Same goes with the unfinished DreamWorks book (laptop) and my AOTC book that was just started was never on the desktop, only on the laptop.
Nonetheless, I have used boot disks on that computer to try to get the thing up and use Norton System Works, but none of that worked. I tried, with a friend, to make the HD a slave drive on my sister's computer and it freezes while trying to run ScanDisk. Basically, the hardware is bad. There is nothing you can do yourself if the hardware is bad except for get a professional to attempt to save information and I don't want anyone else poking around MY confidential documents and passwords, or I will have to change every single one of those passwords across something like 25 online forums and all of my server passwords and my affiliate programs and my mailing lists and my e-mail logins and on and on.
Anyway... I can probably rebuild a lot of what I need with just time and a lot less money and I don't want to go through the pain of it all. That's my personal computer, and I don't want to send my hard disk anywhere else plain and simple.
So it looks like I will not even have online access except through these computers in the house that are not mine, and I won't be sitting around these places typing on forums that's for sure.
I will probably be away for a while until I can get a new computer, and NOT a Dell.
As a lesson, just remember to back your important files up, and do it with CDs if you have to, but it'll still be cheaper than having to go through more BS. I also lost a few hundred megs worth of AIM conversations, a lot of them with people I used to talk to and will most likely never talk to again. So I lose all of that.
I have pretty much lost everything at this point, from my old car (and now I have my new one, which I love, but was it worth nearly dying for?!), to half of my friends (mostly girls), to my hope for a book deal sometime soon, to my idea of a successful online business (I am not doing TOO bad but my projections still went horribly wrong), to my movie site that was supposed to do well and really didn't take off, to my one time on the radio where I was not asked back, to having to leave my first college because it was such a miserable experience, and that only after not being accepted to USC or UCLA after working my butt off for 4 years and getting better grades and SAT scores than the three people from my class who made it into USC, etc. I mean the list goes on infinitely long. I have no idea what I did to deserve all of this nonsense, but the only solution in my view to restore a bit of what has been lost is to spend my time working from when I wake up to when I go to bed and just hope I can rebuild a bit of this.
Every time you try really hard to do something right and it doesn't work out, it naturally takes at least some time to recover. Much like after you lift a really heavy weight, your muscles need time before they can go again, and that time is limited at first, maybe even only 10 to 15 seconds. Then as you continue working out, it takes longer and longer and you are not able to do as much as quickly because your muscles are simply tired. Well, I have tried and tried again at a variety of things, many that people my age rarely do, and after repeated misfires (some are not failures, just ongoing projects that worked less-well that expected), then it takes enough out of me so that it's very hard to just get back up and try again. I have already been at the point for ages where I feel almost totally unmotivated because I feel almost paralyzed by the past. Then a few days ago I started doing some work again and was making some good progress anyway, and my computer just erased it all. Now I have nothing whatsoever. This is definitely ground zero.
I don't think there has probably been a worse day for me as far as when the day ends, what do I have to look forward to and what has been lost? Other days may have been worse like when I broke my wrist, but let's face it, that was always going to heal in a period of 6 weeks or whatever, and then I'd be fine again. A minor annoyance, that is all.
So, I hope you are all able to see AOTC a few more times, I hope you have a good few days, or weeks, and I'll hopefully be able to check in from time to time. I'm still going to be seeing AOTC commonly when I can, so no worries there.
May the Force be With You All!
I mean, the number of things that have gone wrong within that period is shocking. Regardless of living in a nice house or any of that other superficial nonsense, things have been far from even decent or acceptable.
I was pretty depressed last night about my best friend not even talking to me in five days and he just spends all his time with his girlfriend and work. Not like last summer, when we did everything together. Anyway, it was a bad night. I of course thought it couldn't get much worse, and every time I think that, it does.
Today, I woke up to a hard disk drive that is simply not going to work ever again. I have lost hundreds of hours of work, everything I was doing for the last few weeks, tons of Star Wars images, trailers, personal pictures from Hawaii, password files, access codes to forums, bookmarks to important places online (freelance writing job sites, collectible sites), a list I made of my DVD collection, all of my freelance articles are lost I believe, 500+ MP3s that made up basically every song I really wanted to have that took me forever to assemble because my lousy Internet connection speed. It's all gone. A lot of my life was on that computer, and although I'm not so gullible as not to back up my key files, still, a lot of this stuff I had simply never bothered to backup because I had so many gigs of information. I had video files that I was editing with my friend for several days, which are now totally lost.
The only things I have are every file that is on my server, like my movie reviews are all accessible somehow, but not in Word format. I have lost printable versions of every single review I have except for a few I wrote in Hawaii. I lost about 10 hours of work I put into the site that hadn't been updated. I didn't lose any reviews, though, don't think I lost even one of those because they are up online. I can put them back into Word and it would take forever, though. I have copies of my books, like the final manuscript copy of Anticipation, in print (x2), on disk (x1), and on my laptop (x1). So obviously something as precious as that is well preserved. Same goes with the unfinished DreamWorks book (laptop) and my AOTC book that was just started was never on the desktop, only on the laptop.
Nonetheless, I have used boot disks on that computer to try to get the thing up and use Norton System Works, but none of that worked. I tried, with a friend, to make the HD a slave drive on my sister's computer and it freezes while trying to run ScanDisk. Basically, the hardware is bad. There is nothing you can do yourself if the hardware is bad except for get a professional to attempt to save information and I don't want anyone else poking around MY confidential documents and passwords, or I will have to change every single one of those passwords across something like 25 online forums and all of my server passwords and my affiliate programs and my mailing lists and my e-mail logins and on and on.
Anyway... I can probably rebuild a lot of what I need with just time and a lot less money and I don't want to go through the pain of it all. That's my personal computer, and I don't want to send my hard disk anywhere else plain and simple.
So it looks like I will not even have online access except through these computers in the house that are not mine, and I won't be sitting around these places typing on forums that's for sure.
I will probably be away for a while until I can get a new computer, and NOT a Dell.
As a lesson, just remember to back your important files up, and do it with CDs if you have to, but it'll still be cheaper than having to go through more BS. I also lost a few hundred megs worth of AIM conversations, a lot of them with people I used to talk to and will most likely never talk to again. So I lose all of that.
I have pretty much lost everything at this point, from my old car (and now I have my new one, which I love, but was it worth nearly dying for?!), to half of my friends (mostly girls), to my hope for a book deal sometime soon, to my idea of a successful online business (I am not doing TOO bad but my projections still went horribly wrong), to my movie site that was supposed to do well and really didn't take off, to my one time on the radio where I was not asked back, to having to leave my first college because it was such a miserable experience, and that only after not being accepted to USC or UCLA after working my butt off for 4 years and getting better grades and SAT scores than the three people from my class who made it into USC, etc. I mean the list goes on infinitely long. I have no idea what I did to deserve all of this nonsense, but the only solution in my view to restore a bit of what has been lost is to spend my time working from when I wake up to when I go to bed and just hope I can rebuild a bit of this.
Every time you try really hard to do something right and it doesn't work out, it naturally takes at least some time to recover. Much like after you lift a really heavy weight, your muscles need time before they can go again, and that time is limited at first, maybe even only 10 to 15 seconds. Then as you continue working out, it takes longer and longer and you are not able to do as much as quickly because your muscles are simply tired. Well, I have tried and tried again at a variety of things, many that people my age rarely do, and after repeated misfires (some are not failures, just ongoing projects that worked less-well that expected), then it takes enough out of me so that it's very hard to just get back up and try again. I have already been at the point for ages where I feel almost totally unmotivated because I feel almost paralyzed by the past. Then a few days ago I started doing some work again and was making some good progress anyway, and my computer just erased it all. Now I have nothing whatsoever. This is definitely ground zero.
I don't think there has probably been a worse day for me as far as when the day ends, what do I have to look forward to and what has been lost? Other days may have been worse like when I broke my wrist, but let's face it, that was always going to heal in a period of 6 weeks or whatever, and then I'd be fine again. A minor annoyance, that is all.
So, I hope you are all able to see AOTC a few more times, I hope you have a good few days, or weeks, and I'll hopefully be able to check in from time to time. I'm still going to be seeing AOTC commonly when I can, so no worries there.
May the Force be With You All!