friends, technology

30 who?

Today. i am 32. i don’t feel any different, i still think i look young. but this has been an extremely long week . . .

Zoey arrived here Sunday with her father, a Ryder truck and all of her belongings. she and Brooks and i have spent the week moving into our new house, with her living space in the loft, setting up the areas, drinking quite a good spell, watching movies, trying to adjust and relax which has been nearly impossible what with all the work and storage facilities and pianos to move and well . . . the rest of it as you can only imagine and would be a crashing bore to read.

last weekend i installed the best processor my motherboard would accept and upgraded my memory. i have 2 60GB harddrives: one with the OS on it and the other simply to store a series of drag and drop folders containing things such as documents, email, music, folders, programs, drivers, web site backups, etc. because i refreshed my speed, i decided to install a fresh, reformatted copy of XP. took the time to establish that the back up was done and the folders were intact. unplugged the backup drive so as not acccidentally overwrite it, reformatted, re-installed, plugged the drive back in, the BIOS saw them both but then – the drive wouldn’t access, it made a noise that sounded to me, not as catastrophic as a head crash, but more like a mechanical failure, like the arm couldn’t go across and read even though the disc was spinning, but perhaps not fast enough.

Well – i spent the whole night crying and flipping out, woke up with swollen eyes, skipped work and overnighted the drive to Drive Savers who are the best in the business in Data Recovery. i can only hope it’s all still intact and the estimate ($500-$2700) is based on the completeness and complexity. these guys take the plates apart in an anti-static lab environment and rebuild the data, transfer it to a new disc or burn it to the media of your choice (in my case DVDs.) these guys have dealt with discs that have endured fire damage, been tossed out car windows while encased in a laptop, submerged underwater, even shot. i can only hope mine is straighforward, uncorrupted retrieval.

losing that amount of important data is devastating. i feel like someone has erased 7 years of my life, or gave me a frontal lobotomy, or my house has burned down. the moral of the story is backup. keep a backup of your backup. and bakup your secondary backup to media that is not only different but stored elsewhere.

even so, there is also and exchange when things go wrong, things also go well in transition . . .

while some die, others are born and live . . . the Polyphemus moth’s egss that i wrote about previously have hatched. 20 egss, 18 caterpillars hatched, 5 now have survived to their second instar and are still eating and growing and dropping much frass (poop) i have also successfully mated two other species and contained their eggs and am waiting for them to hatch. soon i’ll have to build them a proper house for rearing as well.

today is my birthday, i have to go to work, my office is a tower of boxes around me, my moths are fluttering in a glass enclosure nearby, and i will let them go today since they have given me their gifts.

more sweetness to come later, but for now, i find myself green again, crawling the length of a leaf and eating slowly all Summer, waiting to spin some silk and to sleep in the Autumn.