April Foo-UCK!!!

In the last couple of weeks, I've had more than my share of problems with electronics.

- My cell phone keeps freezing

- My laptop shut down spontaneously before a meeting, losing all the files I had prepared for the meeting

- My printer died in the middle of a job

And most recently, this morning the virtual XP machine on my mac at work died.

Luckily, there wasn't too much data loss in any of these circumstances. A printer loss, no doubt, but it wasn't really mine anyway and it clears up some space in my apartment.

The most stressful one--aside from the recurrent stress of having to resist the urge to throw my cell phone across the room--was the machine at work.

Luckily, I started a few weeks ago to do weekly backups of my virtual machine image, which itself I only really use for the accounting program, which I also backup weekly. But it being year-end, we had done a lot of year-end transactions this week.

The worst part is, I had finally got it to restart at one point, and got into Windows, but the accounting program wasn't opening up the file for some reason. At that point, I should have saved a copy of the file on the host OS before doing anything further. Instead, I simply shut it down and tried to do a repair installation of Windows XP.

And of course, something broke with the repair installation partway through (it ran out of disk space?!? Not technically possible), which corrupted the file beyond repair.

Luckily, after a good three or four hours of failed troubleshooting, and after restoring the backups from last Friday, we were able to re-create all the transactions that were done in the last week (thank goodness for triplicate!)

But between all this stress (which kept me inside for lunch), plus stress from a few other battles going on in my life, plus being sick last weekend, it's been really hard to not just say "fuck it" and go live on an island.

It's also been terribly depressing, which I hear is going around.

Hopefully I'll recover, and will get back to using this blog to bitch about other people, instead of just myself.

- RG>