Grrr
For some obscure reason unknown to all but a few, my Thunderbird email reader decided to crash this morning. Not the hissy-fit temperamentality of Outlook Express, mind you. No on-again, off-again indecisiveness. This was a quite simple 'I am not going to work for you anymore' type thing. Click on the Thunderbird Icon and... nothing. It was as if the program was no longer there. Jealous leprechauns had come in during the night and spirited away all my emails, though quite what leprechauns would want with my emails, I have no idea.
Now I'm a disorganised kind of fellow, as some of you may have worked out by now. And like many similarly haphazard folk, I use my email reader programme as a great big filing cabinet. I've been using Thunderbird for two years now, and several years worth of earlier emails had been imported into it when I abandoned Microsoft products for ones that actually work (well, most of the time). So my entire on-line history for the past five years suddenly disappeared.
Cue slight panic.
Of course, they hadn't disappeared really. All the emails, drafts, replies and other nonsense, including every post and comment ever posted on this blog, were sitting in a series of unreadable files at the bottom of a complex file structure in the bowels of Windows XP. But since they had never been backed up, there was no easy way to restore them. Or read them. Worse still, I was going to have to uninstall and reinstall Thunderbird to get it working, which meant that I would lose all the details for my several email accounts, not to mention my rss feeds. The passwords and settings for all of these accounts are stored securely on my computer - in a series of emails.
So today has been a day of arsing around trying to remember things, digging through old paper records and generally tearing out my hair. Six hours and much swearing later, I've finally managed to recreate something approaching the file structure I had before, and repopulate it with the old emails, yanked from their electronic graves by sleight of hand and swearing. Hoo-bloody-ray.
Anything that arrived this morning has most likely been eaten by a pack of marauding spam demons, and I've still not had time to re-list all the blogs and other sites I had on rss feed. A whole day wasted at the altar of technology. I was meant to be writing today, but now I just want to go and stick my head somewhere cool and quiet.
Bugger, bugger, bugger.
Now I'm a disorganised kind of fellow, as some of you may have worked out by now. And like many similarly haphazard folk, I use my email reader programme as a great big filing cabinet. I've been using Thunderbird for two years now, and several years worth of earlier emails had been imported into it when I abandoned Microsoft products for ones that actually work (well, most of the time). So my entire on-line history for the past five years suddenly disappeared.
Cue slight panic.
Of course, they hadn't disappeared really. All the emails, drafts, replies and other nonsense, including every post and comment ever posted on this blog, were sitting in a series of unreadable files at the bottom of a complex file structure in the bowels of Windows XP. But since they had never been backed up, there was no easy way to restore them. Or read them. Worse still, I was going to have to uninstall and reinstall Thunderbird to get it working, which meant that I would lose all the details for my several email accounts, not to mention my rss feeds. The passwords and settings for all of these accounts are stored securely on my computer - in a series of emails.
So today has been a day of arsing around trying to remember things, digging through old paper records and generally tearing out my hair. Six hours and much swearing later, I've finally managed to recreate something approaching the file structure I had before, and repopulate it with the old emails, yanked from their electronic graves by sleight of hand and swearing. Hoo-bloody-ray.
Anything that arrived this morning has most likely been eaten by a pack of marauding spam demons, and I've still not had time to re-list all the blogs and other sites I had on rss feed. A whole day wasted at the altar of technology. I was meant to be writing today, but now I just want to go and stick my head somewhere cool and quiet.
Bugger, bugger, bugger.
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