Death, Taxes, and Hard Drive crashes.

These are inevitable truths. You must pay the tax man, and you can't escape death. Nor can your computer's hard drive. I can't tell you how many people are surprised by this. Perhaps it's the fundamental lack of understanding about how computers work. Maybe it's my fundamental understanding the makes me wonder how anyone could be surprised by this. At the core it's all about the odds. The moving parts of any mechanical object will stop moving eventually. This could be decades or centuries for something like a well made clock. But for a device that crams more raw data than the Library of Congress, being made in bulk by the lowest bidder in a 3rd world country, it's a no-brainer. The part of your computer with the most moving parts, being put under constant use, is going to fail. And when it does, if you haven't made a copy of everything precious to you somewhere else, then the 1800 family photos will be lost forever.
The only thing you can do is take matters into your own hands. Start b trying to estimate the cost of recovery. How would you go back in time and take all those pictures again? How much would it costs a fancy data-recovery joint to try to mind-meld with your hard drive and extract the data? Try to put a dollar-value on your data. Then realize that for a small fraction of that cost, you could have a backup scheme that would prevent you from having to spend that much money.
Next, learn how to back things up .You learned how to lock your doors and stop at stoplights and make a 2nd photocopy of your tax documents. Backing up is Drag'n'Drop easy in most cases. Simply copying the stuff somewhere besides just the one guaranteed-to-fail is enough.
Get a 2nd hard drive. Invest in one of the on-line data backup places. Use DVDs, CDs, Flash drives. Just make a 2nd copy of your really important stuff.
Keep up with it. Making a back up once is great, and far more than most people do. But you'll want to keep up with it. Make it a routine (just like locking your doors at night eh?) so you alwys have a current crop to use.
Don't forget to check it. All digital media is unstable. Repeat all digital media is unstable. That means every backup device I suggested above has a pretty high chance of failing. Go back and make sure you can get to your backup files. Doesn't do much good to burn your entire music collection onto dvds if they get scratched and unreadable.
Really all we're doing is trying to beat the odds. The chance of any one device going belly up is pretty good. The chance that more than one all go bad at the same time? Less likely. And obviously the more time/money you put into any solution, the less risk you have (assuming you've done your homework and invested in the right scheme).
Now if you'll excuse me I have to go figure out my taxes: a task far more confusing than dealing with with a dead hard drive.

Flaming Depth

The dead midget in the coffin isn't dead. In fact, he's going to wake up right at the most inopportune time and the drugged out dude who thought the coffin was moving and making noises earlier is going to have a total relapse and everything is going to erupt in a frenetic self-concluding crisis-climax-denouement The End.

Work meetings are like a bad indie comedy. Obviously thought out by intellegent people, with quirky banter that can me mostly interesting. But it's usually just a slow, predictable train-wreck. You know the characters: A boss so out of touch all they can do is try to keep up and interject business-class buzzwords at random intervals. Two or three young go getters who talk the most vigorously and engage in the occasional slapstick joke just to keep you awake. Bunch of 'steady bettys' who only understand every 3rd word and don't really want to deviate from 'the way it's always been'. Anyone who's been around the block enough can see that it's going no where, but there's no stop button. You can only hope you don't get caught up in the nonsensical minutia and drag the thing out longer by trying to add any new ideas or common sense to equation.

You rented it, take your licks and hope the disk is scratched. That's the only way you're getting out early.

Summer comes early.

Feels like the long gone days of summer. Summers for some are the peak, the end result of 9 months of hard work. For me summers were always some strange world. Where I almost never felt like I was getting what I wanted. I was a wandering, aimless fool. Just enough of an outsider to even my social group that I had trouble coming up with stuff to do. Couple of adolescent summers away from home and stuck away from what I was used to may have started things off. Or maybe it was the summers spend in daycare or at home under the watch of my older brother? Doesn't matter, the fact is I never amounted to much in the summer months. Even through school and college, I would wind up in strange jobs just outside the world. Graveyard shift, groundskeeper at a music venue, running the pre-show junk at the theatre venue. Now its even easier to do nothing with a whole house and family to take care of.

I blame the fact that so much stuff comes easy. There are those people who start out with everything hard and have to struggle start to finish. Others are the annoying ones whom everything always comes/looks easy. I fall somewhere in the middle, the intelligent people with common sense for which many things start out easy, but reach a point where it takes work to continue. That place for me is somewhere in the C+ B- range. This has managed to get me as far as I am now. Do whatever until that thing gets hard, then bail. Once I hit the 1st plateau of diminishing returns I simply quit and take the consequences.. To this day I don't have the motivation to move into the hard stuff and really chew it up and get to where I can excel. This got me through high-school but not college. Gets me into a good job but no farther, it's the reason some stuff around the house isn't done, why I don't write anything useful, why I don't even get good at the video games I waste most of my time on.

When in doubt I'm a selfish lazy, coward. Never able to take a risk or creep out from the hiding place that is almost circumstance. It's taken me a long time to realize that you need to go out and make things happen for yourself. No one is going to do it for you. Realization or not it still takes effort to go forth. I may be misquoting but Mark Twain had it best "Even if you're on the right track you'll get run over if you just sit there." Summer always brought out the most of that from graduation to September, it's just a dreamworld of should-haves waiting ot happen.