Journal Entries
*grr* for broken hard drives
Posted Nov 19, 2002
So.. I'm consigning myself to another evening of sitting in my room with no internet or anyone to talk to.. hopefully.. *fingers crossed*.. I'll have a copy of some Rousseau to read, which means I'l be able to actually work. Wish me luck..
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Latest reply: Nov 19, 2002
I'm..
Posted Nov 18, 2002
..uh.. confused. I wish I could say it were pleasant confusion, but the best it gets is bitter-sweet. Which isn't /that/ bad in the scheme of things, but makes it a little more perplexing, but to say the least. 
Oh, yes, and I'm unlikely to have much (if any) internet access for the next few days (weeks, actually), due to the aforementioned broken laptop (
), so if anyone desperately feels a yearning to get in contact with me, it'll have to be by E-Mail (assuming I can get to these), Text Message (I get free ones of these. 
), Phone Call, etc.
Come on, someone's got to want to talk to me. 
That aside, I'm also hoping to actually get some work done this week. .. 
.. since there's no computer to distract me. (Yeah.. like that'll change anything. 
)
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Latest reply: Nov 18, 2002
I think..
Posted Nov 17, 2002
..it'd be safe to say that I'm not in the best of moods. I've just come to the conclusion that I'm almost certainly never ever going to see any of my data again. Having my laptop currently in for repair, the hard drive has been sitting upstairs in a very safe place, ready to be put back into my repaired laptop. (the hard drive was perfectly good, and therefore they let me keep it).. upon going to get the hard drive (to take back with me to my flat, since I'm staying with my parents for the week), it rattles. This is decidedly not good.
So, since I've done a lot of work in forensics and data recovery, I fire up my forensics machine with the laptop hard drive attached, in the hope that the heads aren't parked and that the hard drive will still work. Not only does the hard drive not spin up or even make a noise, but an unpleasant burning smell makes itself apparant.
Crap.
At this point, I wonder exactly what's on my hard drive. My entire music collection (my cds, after being ripped, get discarded around the house, so rebuilding this, since my mp3 collection numbers well over 25gb, will be time-consuming, and I won't get much of the music back). 10 years of E-Mail. An ICQ contact list of over 250 people. All of my E-Mail addresses. A truly colossal PGP keyring. The only copies of my multiply counter-signed PGP private keys. Every website I've ever designed. IRC logs dating back to 1996, and countless more megabytes of data which I can't even begin to think of. Suffice to say, most of my life is contained in a small foul-smelling 2.5" crashed hard drive which I have absolutely no hope for recovering any data off. At all.
Quite simply, if anyone'd wanted to cause me any more suffering than I'd already endured this year, getting rid of the data on that hard drive would be about the most mentally damaging thing they could possibly do. Ironically, I laughed at the prospect of this happening only this afternoon, whilst listening to one of the 150 songs I copied onto the desktop I've been using temporarily. "When you like music more than life, something's wrong" (Something's wrong, K's Choice). Discarding all of the other data I've lost, which is just about copable, I've lost just about every megabyte of many many years worth of music build up, and as someone who point blank requires music to cope, I don't know how bearable this is going to be.
This is probably akin to what most people would experience if left to watch their house burn down with everything they owned it, whilst powerless to do anything to stop it happening. Fate has a truly foul sense of humour. "I don't want to start any blasphemous rumours, but I think that god's got a sick sense of humour, and when I die, I expect to find him laughing" (Blasphemous Rumours, Depeche Mode)
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Latest reply: Nov 17, 2002
mozart is good..
Posted Nov 14, 2002
..escapism is good.. mozart is escapism.. mozart is very good.
*chants, listens, and forgets everything else*
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Latest reply: Nov 14, 2002
Reading through..
Posted Nov 14, 2002
..old just un-backlogged journal entries before uncluttering my page by removing them I found it mildly amusing quite how much the ethos of the journal entry I intended to write clashes violently with journal entries two years ago. 
The journal entry I was going to write, then, went something like this...
I have in fact managed to get so drunk that, the morning after having snuck into more than one (two.. three.. four.. ) college bars in oxford (none of the colleges of which I have any affiliation with. ), I managed to almost fall down the steps of worcester college after having got up and decided I should go home at about 11. .. and from the way I've been staggering around the house, the alcohol still hasn't left my system now. Oh dear. 
Having spilt red wine on my laptop keyboard (are we noticing a pattern here?), the blasted thing (lovely piece of technology that it is, when it works) is .. uh.. well, somewhere being repaired, hard drive excepted (the hard drive is upstairs), and I only have access to the paltry collection of music I copied onto my proxy server hurriedly yesterday morning. However, listening to the La ci Darem La Mano from don Gioganni is still gorgeous on my Sennheisers. *rapturously blissed-out *. I can only pray that my laptop comes back soon so that I can listen to my puccini again. (puccini being one of the many things I didn't copy.. I only have mozart, beethoven, and verdi. *sniff*)
I think my next never-to-be-fulfilled ambition (aside from buying myself a Yamaha vmax) is going to be to build myself a headphone amplifier (preferably one with some crossfeed circuitry of some sort). I'm really getting into this headphone thing. I never thought I'd hear myself saying this, but I really need some cds; I'm starting to notice mp3 compression artefacts in my lower bitrate files more than ever on expensive headphones.. whilst on my AKG K-66s, 128kbit files were at least bearable, they're a bit annoying on nicer cans.
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Latest reply: Nov 14, 2002
njan (afh)
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