(no subject)

I walked into the lunch room today and realized that I had no idea if the person I saw sitting at one of the tables was the person I've been mentoring for the last hour. I stalled for time by standing around in front of the microwave and trying to glance at her without her noticing I was looking so I could figure it out. The only thing about her appearance that I managed to pull out of my brain was the peculiar way the strands of hair that made up her bangs looked. I don't think it was her, so I'm hoping I didn't offend her by behaving as if it wasn't.

This is part of why dealing with people stresses me.

Data recovery of the stuff I deleted seems to be a bust. I spent two hours running data recovery tools and sorting through chunks of recovered data (PC Inspector seems to be a decent freeware tool for this by the way.) and found only small chunks of a few emails. I checked my server and found that I had set it to never delete old messages a while ago so there are nearly a thousand messages sitting on it. I'm not sure how far back they go but I feel better about that. What I really wanted were my chat records which, it seems, are gone.

But in the end, these are just things and I still have Andrea. We talked for a while last night and it made me feel better. I'm moving on toward the acceptance phase...

Anyway, here's the ten things meme that's been floating around.

Ten Things I've done that you (probably) haven't:

1. Married my first and only love.
   
2. Done non professional, but non school-related, light, sound, and rigging (stringing cable, weighting and hanging curtains and flying walls, etc. sixty two feet above the stage) work for a theatre.
   
3. Been to a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 convention and toured their production studio.
   
4. Attended a national Rainbow Gathering with my mother. We both loved being there.
   
5. Both performed in and run lights for a play that my dad was also performing in. (How did I do lights and act at the same time? It was a walk-on at the end of the third act. Someone else took over and ran the board through the final few cues.)
   
6. Been both high over my city of residence (on the roof of the Michigan Central Station) and deep below it (in the storm drains of Kenosha) in places where I'm not supposed to be.
   
7. Got to the age of twenty-four without having tried drinking alcohol. This is not to say whether this is good or bad; it just is. (A year into knowing Andrea I finally tried some chocolaty liquor she suggested.)
   
8. Took my computer (in its three foot tall full-tower case) and all peripherals except the monitor with me on a cross-country bus trip 'cause I couldn't live without it for a week. (I had a large piece of luggage. They told me on the return trip that it was too large to fit on the bus and I shouldn't have it. Yeah, I'm going to leave my luggage at a bus station in Idaho...)
   
9. Worked for a comics and games company and have my name in the credits for several gaming related books and products.
   
10. Taught myself to read the runic alphabet used in the Ultima series of games (essentially a single letter substitution cipher based on Norse runes) by sitting down and copying the first five pages of the game manual into runic. Yes, I was an obsessive little boy. I guess I still am in many ways...

(no subject)

Oh my God/dess.

I found my lost files.

I started looking through my third partition and, buried deep down in a folder full of junk that's been hanging around and accumulating over about the last four system rebuilds I've done, I found the chat records and saved voice mail that I thought I'd permanently lost. Thank the powers that be that not only am I lazy about cleaning out my old files, but I am also a data packrat.

Words would probably fail to describe my reaction to finding these, but it involved what is probably an embarrassing amount of squealing and bouncing.

Yes; I have learned my lesson. The files are being burned to a CD even as I type. I'm also going to figure out critera for classifying data as critical and start regularly backing things up just as I should have been doing already. This will not be happening again.