Breaking Things
Few things will make time pass as fast as it does when I am trying to solve an intractable computer problem. Without going too deep in the weeds, tonight I found out that my version of Hombrew, a program manager of sorts on Macs was an unupdated relic that I'd imported when I bought the computer in December. It had never been updated to match the architecture of my new device. I set about running that update and when I did, the program lost connection with all the programs it managed for me, mostly highly technical stuff that runs behind the scenes to do things like download video, perform object character recognition and convert graphics files. I do not like walking away from an uncooperative computer, especially my own. That's why all my writing time disappeared tonight and I'm thumb typing this while laying beside my dimly glowing laptop as it restore's a backup.
I have a long history of breaking computers and staying up all night to fix them, although it hasn't happened in a while. My most infamous case happened long before I got sober. Back in the days of tiny hard drives, I wanted to write a batch file that would delete all on temporary files every time I rebooted my computer. It was just a one liner and it should have read " del C:\Windows\Temp\*.* Well, my drunken self typed del C:\Windows\*.* and restarted the computer. I immediately heard the hard drive start to grind away as it removed files. What I'd done was delete Windows, the operating system that runs the device. This was during the days before CDs. I had to bring out a big box of floppy disks and feed them to the machine one at the time, praying that none of them were bad in order to make things work. All of my custom settings were gone, and things were set back to default.
Since I do this for a living as well as a hobby, I have had many, many problems through the years trying to update or patch legacy programs, restore missing data and other head scratchers, and that's just on systems I maintain for my employer. For the people I support, the worst thing I've faced on a regular basis is being approached by someone with tears in their eyes and a USB drive in their hands. These are the folks who don't understand the meaning of "backup" and have entrusted a $10 thumb drive with precious data, like (and I'm not making this up) their master's thesis, their wedding video or all of the lessons plans from their decade long teaching career. I'm not batting 1.000 getting all of that data back but I have been hugged a few times for rescuing some of it. That rescue comes with a stern lecture boy what a real backup actually is. Thankfully, most (but not all) people are using Google Drive, Dropbox or OneDrive these days and there is less of that drama.
There have been a few non-emergency computer projects that have consumed me. Back before Spotify and Apple Music when I used to maintain a collection of tunes on my own hard drive, a collection that consisted of files from Napster, ripped CDs, the iTunes store and the contribution of friends through the wonder of torrents, I was adamant about maintaining the metadata of all my songs. Since, in my pirate days, I regularly collected things like the Rolling Stone Top 500 Albums, I always had a huge backlist of files that needed album art or had other missing information that I had to type in by hand. I'll never get all those hours back and these days that collection of over 200GB of music sits on a cloud drive, but even used any more.
My current passion project is a collection of quotes I've been assembling over the past decade. After going through several apps I decided to maintain the collection in Obsidian, since it uses Markdown, a plain text markup language. It's slow going and I keep finding new quotes to add to my collection. I've even made my assemblage of quotes available on GitHub for anyone else who likes them.
cyclelou/Amerpie: Downloadable Quotes in Markdown files for Obsidian (github.com)
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