There's not much to say about the finals; I studied damned hard and although I don't officially know my grades, I came out of them knowing they went well. My grades were solid enough going in that I'd have had to have bombed the exams to have hurt my final grade, but who wants to go out on anything but a really strong note? So I went for that, and came out feeling I had it. (I did get 100% on the last lab practical, that much I know for sure.) So, school over for now.
The computer story:
I have a Mac, which I do love, but which has not been the trouble-free Machine of Paradise I expected it to be. While I tend to get curious about how natural, mechanical, and structural things work, computers are none of the above, and it is an understatement to say I'm not all that interested in them from a functional standpoint - I generally just want them to do their job without my having to get bogged down in a lot of details. To that end, I don't do a lot of funky things on them. I surf the intertubes, organize photos, do music, write, play a few simple games.... I don't download crazy shit, am wary of where I surf, and until recently always backed up my hard drive.
Until recently, because for reasons I still don't understand, the Time Machine function on this Mac ceased to function several months ago. I figured it had to be something on my external hard drive, because what goes wrong with a Mac? Right? So after trying a lot of trouble shooting and finally taking a very deep breath, I blew away my backup drive, with the expectation that THAT would cure my problem and I'd be back in the time machine business.
Not so. However, I decided that for the short term, I'd fly without that particular net. I am a poor student and shelling out for a new drive didn't seem all that critical; although I've ALWAYS had a back-up drive (my earliest one was actually a tape drive), I've never once used it. Still, better to have and not to need, than need and not to have, right? But what goes wrong with Macs?
So... Tuesday after school, I was translating a couple of files to MP3 format so I could listen to them on a much needed, post exam cooling off walk, when my computer, which had been acting crotchety for a while, just stopped. Pinweel of Death, couldn't click on a damned thing kind of stopped. I tried nice reboots, and not so nice reboots; my dock (basically, the Mac's functional menu) wouldn't pop up, and while I could get to most programs via a second route, it took for-freaking-ever for anything to load. I was absolutely not in a state of mind to deal with this at the moment, so I shut the thing down and went for a walk.
Next day I ran a diagnostic on the thing. Mac diagnostics are actually lame as hell compared to PC diagnostics. It essentially told me my computer was fucked up (no! Really?) and I should take a flier at it with the start-up disc. So I spent much of the rest of the day offloading (or so I thought) everything I could on to the drive that used to serve as my back-up (why it seems to work perfectly well that way and NOT for Time Machine is beyond me, but that's how it is), figuring this was probably, one way or another, going to come down to my having to blow everything away and reinstall the system.
And it did. I put in the start up disc, ran the diagnostic on IT, which told me I had a software problem, not a hardware problem - my first actual piece of diagnostic data. I spent several hours trying diagnostic things suggested on the Mac help page; most of them, the computer wouldn't do; I couldn't even get a Pinwheel of Death out of it, just no response. After what seemed like a baseball game's worth of strike outs, I learned what at the time seemed like a single useful thing; my OS had a feature called Archive and Reinstall, which would magically save all of my settings and personal shit whilst the OS installed itself, then reinstall them. So emboldened, and thinking I'd done a good job of backing things up Just in Case, I jumped off the Reinstall cliff.
The whole process took several hours, and to make a long story short, I could not Archive and Reinstall. I don't know why; I was just told in MacEse that my computer was too fucked up for that. So I had to do a total reinstall. Which my computer told me, in MacEse, that it could not do, because my computer was too fucked up. Would I like to try again? And again? It finally went, and when I tried to reload my personal info from my back up drive, I found that my incomplete knowledge of Mac file structure had lead me to believe I'd saved certain things - namely, ALL of my photographs and my iTunes library - when I hadn't.
At this point I literally sat down on the floor and cried. It was like a huge piece of my life was gone, and there was nothing I could do about it - and it was all my fault. That was a very, very hard pill to swallow. The iTunes, I can rebuild in time; I am such a Luddite in that area that most of what I had I've downloaded from CDs, so I can rebuild almost all of it. The pictures, though - that really hurts. To the good, I have shared enough of them over the years that I have uploaded a lot of my favorites to places like Photobucket and ImageShack, so I have those, at the very least.
So I'm rebuilding things slowly. And I'm shopping for a new back-up drive.
Lessons learned:
1) Macs are not holy things that always work as advertised.
2) No matter how trustworthy your computer, don't trust it: back up early, and often. Really.
3) If you do manual backups, make sure you understand your file structure so you're actually saving what you think your saving.
4) Have someone who's more knowledgeable than you check your work.
5) Oh yea, and back up early, and often. Srsly.
Baby Grif says so.
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