![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
From Twitter 02-02-2011
Feb. 3rd, 2011 02:01 am- 16:03:51: RT @alanquincey: I feel bad for all the people dealing with ice, snow, no electricity, no porn.
Tweets copied by twittinesis.com
Feb. 3rd, 2011
Happy New Year?
Feb. 3rd, 2011 09:03 amYesterday was Lunar New Year's Eve. I spent the early part of the evening wishing HWMBO in Singapore, along with my many friends out there, a happy and prosperous New Year. Then everything collapsed.
My system was comprised of a desktop computer, currently usable in safe mode but not otherwise, a network storage box, and various other components. I was composing an email to a friend last night when the email program crashed. A bit of investigation showed me that something was wrong with the power supply to the network storage box, and it had fried the disks inside. On those disks were backups, but, more important, my email archives and the active part of my email system were stored on it. All fried.
Now I can recover all emails before January 7th, as they are still on the desktop computer. I am having some difficulty transferring them to the netbook, and will investigate this further later on today. But this incident highlights some issues in life that I have had difficulties with in the past.
First, I keep all emails. Does this matter? I decided last night, after a bit of swearing, that it doesn't. I would not be happy to lose all the past emails, but losing at most one month's worth out of the past 14 years will not kill me. I've gone through the emails I have still on the mail servers up in the cloud, and stopped emails from groups that I don't need to get and unsubscribed from a few sales email lists that I never intend to buy from. I shall leave all the emails up on the cloud until I have a working copy of Thunderbird with my previous emails on it. And life will go on.
Second, what's important in my life? Not keeping emails, that's for sure. It's making sure that my health is stable, that my feet recover, that HWMBO remains the most important person in my life, and keeping the spiritual side of my life in my mind, heart, and actions. Keeping emails helps none of these things in particular. My life will go on (or not) independent of whether I am saving (or even getting) emails.
So now I can rationally and slowly figure out what to do here. I think that what is necessary is some sort of daily DVD-RW backup of the email database so that it can easily be reconstructed should my netbook go down. I don't think that NAS is necessarily the best solution, especially with flaky power supplies that depend on wall warts rather than internals.
I shall be searching teh Intarwebz this afternoon for specific guidance on moving Thunderbird email databases from one machine to another; I didn't seem to be able to do it last night but it could just have been nervousness. Now that I've had a good night's sleep and a cup of coffee and a bagel, I'm better equipped to face the problem. I also need to migrate my iTunes to the netbook short-term, and to a new computer when that happens.
Long term, one of HWMBO's and my friends in Singapore offered to construct a computer for HWMBO to bring back with him. It must be a compact one, but I hope that it will be stable and, if so, be a way back to relative eventlessness in my personal computing.
Ho hum, now to concentrate on the foot clinic visit today.
My system was comprised of a desktop computer, currently usable in safe mode but not otherwise, a network storage box, and various other components. I was composing an email to a friend last night when the email program crashed. A bit of investigation showed me that something was wrong with the power supply to the network storage box, and it had fried the disks inside. On those disks were backups, but, more important, my email archives and the active part of my email system were stored on it. All fried.
Now I can recover all emails before January 7th, as they are still on the desktop computer. I am having some difficulty transferring them to the netbook, and will investigate this further later on today. But this incident highlights some issues in life that I have had difficulties with in the past.
First, I keep all emails. Does this matter? I decided last night, after a bit of swearing, that it doesn't. I would not be happy to lose all the past emails, but losing at most one month's worth out of the past 14 years will not kill me. I've gone through the emails I have still on the mail servers up in the cloud, and stopped emails from groups that I don't need to get and unsubscribed from a few sales email lists that I never intend to buy from. I shall leave all the emails up on the cloud until I have a working copy of Thunderbird with my previous emails on it. And life will go on.
Second, what's important in my life? Not keeping emails, that's for sure. It's making sure that my health is stable, that my feet recover, that HWMBO remains the most important person in my life, and keeping the spiritual side of my life in my mind, heart, and actions. Keeping emails helps none of these things in particular. My life will go on (or not) independent of whether I am saving (or even getting) emails.
So now I can rationally and slowly figure out what to do here. I think that what is necessary is some sort of daily DVD-RW backup of the email database so that it can easily be reconstructed should my netbook go down. I don't think that NAS is necessarily the best solution, especially with flaky power supplies that depend on wall warts rather than internals.
I shall be searching teh Intarwebz this afternoon for specific guidance on moving Thunderbird email databases from one machine to another; I didn't seem to be able to do it last night but it could just have been nervousness. Now that I've had a good night's sleep and a cup of coffee and a bagel, I'm better equipped to face the problem. I also need to migrate my iTunes to the netbook short-term, and to a new computer when that happens.
Long term, one of HWMBO's and my friends in Singapore offered to construct a computer for HWMBO to bring back with him. It must be a compact one, but I hope that it will be stable and, if so, be a way back to relative eventlessness in my personal computing.
Ho hum, now to concentrate on the foot clinic visit today.
Last night I was rattled enough that I didn't actually pull my entire Thunderbird profile over from the desktop machine, including the all-crucial Mail database. When i got back from the quack this afternoon, I made a complete copy onto my thumbdrive and copied that to the netbook. Aside from a few glitches, it seems to be working and I can now send, receive, and file away emails.
The quack has put me on IV antibiotics again. There is a new pesky bug in the bone under my second right toe. The rest of the ulcers are healing nicely. They will be doing another X-ray next Wednesday and then have a consultation (yet again) with the orthopedic surgeons. I now have to wait at home every day until the district nurse comes. I may have to give them another box of biscuits. This is for two weeks and we will see what transpires.
The quack has put me on IV antibiotics again. There is a new pesky bug in the bone under my second right toe. The rest of the ulcers are healing nicely. They will be doing another X-ray next Wednesday and then have a consultation (yet again) with the orthopedic surgeons. I now have to wait at home every day until the district nurse comes. I may have to give them another box of biscuits. This is for two weeks and we will see what transpires.