Geek File: Desparation Is The Mother Of Disaster.

I had fifteen days of cat-sitting to do in the Berkeley Hills. I loaded up my portable USB drive with my four raw audio files and settled down to get the Black History Presentation edited. So when I returned home, I could burn the CD's, make their artwork and turn in our churches first CD for sale.

Now, I have been known to sit on a job like a hen, hoping inspiration will somehow hatch. It doesn't. But this time, I was on it and REALLY, REALLY worked. Two of the four files were full of those metallic clicks from defective cassette tapes. Oh, how I chased those buggers down!

Yesterday, it seemed like my drive was acting strange and the computer was just frozen in "spinning beach ball" heaven. When I ran disc Utility on the drive it failed and told me it was over.

I was briefly returning home to my newer Mac and slammed that drive back into my machine where it was seen on the desktop just fine. Then I ran disc utility again and something got fixed, according to Disc Utility, but something else got broken, as my "label records" were now invalid and Disc Utility doesn't seem to fix them.

Oh friends, here is where you can take a small water spill from a cup, turning it into an overflowing washing machine flooding your entire home. Beware! There are two demons that will drive you to make terrible judgements. a) current fatigue and b) dread of re-doing hours of work a second tine.

Current fatigue tells you that to re-do a week's worth of work will literally kill you. It won't , but the mess you make to AVOID that re-work, could...actually kill you!

Dread of the re-work. I have a friend who had offered to buy me a program that fixes sick discs and other things where your data goes bye-bye. I refused, at the time, as it appeared I didn't need the program and truthfully wasn't sure I had enough tech savvy to USE the program. But under the twin narcotics of fatigue and dread, I was ready to jump into anything!

I now share the IM's between my friend and I. Note that under normal conditions, (when I am not out of my mind) I would rather buy a new computer than face going into "Terminal" where you can turn your Mac into a doorstop, by fiddling around when you don't know what you are doing.

My Friend: "... and not a guaranteed success I hate to say it, but... You're looking at some re-work my friend."

Me: "np, can I screw around in Terminal and fix the bad records?"

My Friend: "Uh yah... the term "screw around in terminal" NEVER has a good result."

Fellow Geeks and geeks-in-training. I KNOW he already did this proposed experiment and probably had to do two weeks of back work to clean up the mess. What was I thinking?

Me: "sok, I won't die. If I wasn't paying for a vacation this week, I'd have the money (to buy special software)."

My Friend: "lol OK. So I won't even feel the least bit bad then. Vacation! Ha! Some kind of geek you are picking vacation over a tech tool!"

I realize, I must step away from this computer. No searching, logging in, or even pawingthrough the "Help" files. I now leave you to do something harmless, like read an ebook.