The moment your soul fractures
Further proving Dean’s Law of Universal Ironic Tragedy, my media drive today died after almost two years of faithful service, while I was in the process of backing it up for the first time. The cause wasn’t a cruddy Seagate disk, nor some other usual event – no, this was due to the one thing unstoppable by all forces (currently) known to mankind, my sister. Hearing the thuding sound of a spinning disk hitting carpet and the subsequent screching of sheared read heads and deformed platters after your sister’s just thrown it off the table after launching herself backwards off her chair and overbalancing is a soul crushing event.
Casualties: 1 750GB almost-new drive, 1 years backups, 2 years of downloaded installers, several (paid for) software licences and a gabillion TV shows. Luckily I’ve managed to recover all but the installers and backups from other locations — never have only one copy of really important data! — but the experience has taught me that backups really are needed as you can never predict when a chunky arm might spell the premature end of your data. One trip to the shops and I’ve now got another 1TB drive for my backups.
In other news, last week I presented our semester long programming project, written in Managed C++ on the .NET framework, something I’ve posted about previously. Our apparent beta-testing of the language has taught me a lot about project development in the way that only deadlines and real-world development can. After seeing the other presentations on Friday from other teams, I’m pretty happy with the result; our application, while rather dull when compared to the talking cats and videos of fireworks (seriously) of the other entries, was objectively the easiest to use, the most complete, and most importantly it satisfied all the requirements and more set for us in the program specifications document. Now we’ve got a PHD student wanting to get a copy of the program for her studies, which is great news for us if a little confusing. What would a PHD student do with an educational program that requires players to build neurons and answer bio-science related questions?
Only a few days until my end of year exams start. Time to start studying. Urgh.
