That little oh shit moment
I was doing some tidying the other day.
I download a regular batch of files each day. They are the backups to all the sites in my little portfolio. I have had to rely on them at times in the past when a site has run into major difficulty and I have been able to easily restore the site to a pristine condition. Those files are very important.
There is one simple rule with important files – back them up to somewhere safe.
I have a box for storing all my important files: I call it my Black Box. It contains all sorts of stuff such as all my music, my videos, all my photographs and archives of old files. It also contains copies of all the website backups, and a copy of everything currently on my laptop, just in case there is a problem with that.
The other day I was backing up the important stuff when suddenly it failed in the middle of a file. Fuck! I tried to recopy that file. It failed. Double fuck!
Then I realised – my Black Box had failed. It had expired mid-breath. It had had a heart attack. It was dead. It was fit for use only as a door stop. It was a black lump of plastic with some dead electronics inside. I had lost all my backups including a whole load of important stuff. This was my oh shit moment. Bollocks!
Now luckily I had a second backup of my sites’ files [just in case!] so none of my clients was affected but I had lost all my photographs of all my holidays, weddings and kid’s communions and the like.
As luck would have it, a while back I had been messing with an ancient disk which was literally in bits, but I had managed to copy some files onto it as an experiment. All my photos and music were on it. All I had really lost was all my old shit such as stuff I had ripped off from my old workplace and some old websites.
I have ordered a new Black Box which should arrive next week. I can copy back everything onto it, as it’s a bit bigger than the old one.
Sometimes the Gods do smile on me.
How to waste your youth
That Swedish brat Greater Thunderbird is at it again.
God but she’s an intensely irritating child.
Now she has the schoolkids out on strike marching for a cause that has been drummed into them by relentless propaganda. Instead of going out and enjoying themselves they have been radicalised into a cause they probably don’t even understand. They have become the Hitler Youth of the Warble Gloaming movement.
I wonder how many of them have really understood the implication of their demands. How many of them are looking forward to rolling brown-outs and black-outs when the wind fails to blow? Are they prepared to forgo their smart phones and iPads because of the damage to the environment? Have all their parents converted to battery driven cars that have been recharged by a windmill on their rooftops [because mains electricity is fired by non-renewable sources like gas and coal]. Just how many of them realise just how dependent they are on the very things they are trying to abolish? Very few, if any I would imagine.
Sadly they also fail to see the futility of their “strikes”. When a worker strikes there is an impact on goods or services with the resultant public awareness of the cause. When schoolkids take a day off it has no impact whatsoever except maybe giving teachers an easier time. It doesn’t even affect their parents who will just carry on doing what they do every other Friday. So no one gives a shit.
When I was their age I had just left school. I was doing what any young adult should be doing – going out and exploring my new found freedoms. I was the terror of the local pubs and dancehalls. I quickly discovered the joy of my first hangover and the first slap on the face from an irate female. In my College Years I went on lots of protests all right, not because I particularly espoused a particular cause but mainly because it was good craic and anyway it was expected of me as a college student.
They were fucking good times and I’m glad I didn’t waste them.
Roundup
I have seen quite a few alarming announcements lately.
They are generally along the lines of a “worrying” or “startling” new pandemic of the virus amongst the unvaccinated.
This confuses me. Surely the entire pandemic ran riot amongst the unvaccinated last year as no one had had the jab? It has always been amongst the unvaccinated so there can’t be anything new, startling, worrying or otherwise.
Now if they came up with a headline “Worrying new pandemic amongst the vaccinated” it might be newsworthy ,but not entirely unsurprising?
In other news… I managed to take off my trousers last night without sitting and without falling over. That was quite some achievement? Even better, I managed the same trick this morning putting on my trousers. There’s hope for me yet?
I had yet another long nightmare last night. I was of course back working in RTE. This is a very regular occurrence even after all these years. I’m thinking of going to the Labour Relations Commission to demand I get paid for all those night’s work.
Just as a by the by, is it my imagination or are Millennial female’s voices much shriller? They just sound more screechy to me and I find them quite difficult to listen to. It’s not even that horrible accent that has evolved as a sort of middle-class twang which irritates, but the voices themselves are different. They should all take up smoking cigarettes.
There is something very sexy about a deeper husky smoker’s voice.
The Wrath of the Gods
So Melbourne has had an earthquake terrifying the locals?
This somewhat belies the concept of the “Crocodile Dundee” hard man? A few bricks fell off a building? Big deal, A similar thing happened in Skobieville a few weeks back, with no earthquake whatsoever. I presume the bricks just decided to call it a day and die. Anyway the locals just shrugged and just went back to swilling cans of lager, shooting up heroin and backing horses. They are real Hard Men.
The people I feel sorry for are those poor sods in La Palma.
I don’t think I can imagine anything more terrifying than watching a fifteen foot high wall of molten rock slowly oozing its way towards my home with the knowledge that there is nothing whatsoever that I can do about it. It is the ultimate epitome of helplessness.
Flooded homes can be dried out and a lot of belongings saved. Fires are worse but in a worse case scenario you still have the land to rebuild. Volcanic eruptions though are one of the few areas where there is fuck all anyone can do except stand back and watch the mayhem. A lot of people would say you shouldn’t build in an area that has had previous geological upheavals? I’ll let you debate that with the residents of California.
I really feel sorry for those poor bastards of La Palma. They have lost everything except whatever they managed to grab before running. I suppose technically they still own the land but seeing as it is now buried under fifteen feet of rock, boulders and ash they’d be lucky to even determine where their land was, let alone having any use for it. I don’t think I’d want to rebuild there?
The Manor is built on [and of] igneous rock [granite] but that goes back a million years or so and wasn’t even volcanic in origin. The worst fear is a very minor fault line off the coast of Wales which gives an insignificant burp every few decades. It once even rattled the radiators on the wall and woke me up. I just went back to sleep and discovered the next day that it had actually been an earthquake that had toppled one chimney in Wales.
Just look on this and tremble.
