Friday Random 0: PHEW! Edition

No tunes for your imaginative delectation today. Sorry about that.

Why, you ask? Because I had a computer FREAK-OUT today. Basically, there was a corrupted index on my drive, which "disk check" found and repaired when I ran disk check upon restarting the machine. Then, when it finished powering up, the files in that index, the files which contain the results of this entire academic year's labor, the files that include the output of a lot of annotating, proofreading, reproofreading, contemplating, reproofreading, e-mailing with my collaborator about, and reproofreading, were . . .

GONE.

So that sound that you probably heard even where you were at about 8:21 a.m. EDT was the sound of my gut falling out of my body and into the center of the earth.

And, so that you don't need to spend even another minute feeling (you are so empathetic) as I did for about 6 hours of my day, I'll tell you everything was recovered with no loss of data. Nevertheless, I spent the intervening hours figuring out what parts of those files I had in recoverable form elsewhere (on my memory stick, in printed form with or without written comments on them, on my collaborator's hard drive, etc.) and saying YOU DUMBASS!!! WHY DIDN'T YOU BACK UP YESTERDAY? OR LAST WEEK? OR THE WEEK BEFORE THAT?

Because sometimes I am an dumbass, that's why. And this was one of those time.

So now it is 5:43 pm EDT, and I am sighing great relief. The files were recovered. The files now exist in at least 5 places. I have printed clean copies of things. I have purchased a new external hard drive to use for backing up my files. I have not had as many scotches as I would like to have, because in about 20 minutes I'm going swimming, but that's OK. The scotch will be here when I get home.

Meanwhile, I'm going to go extra-random on your asses by presenting this Friday's Random 10 on some other occasion--it will be a surprise, and perhaps (as a result) even more random.

I know you are hanging on the edge of your seats.