Pages Turn, Chapters End.™

As a pedes­trian in The Greater Los Ange­les Area, I find myself in per­ilous sit­u­a­tions on a reg­u­lar basis due in large part to motorists who drive both care­lessly and reck­lessly. I wish I were speak­ing hyperbolically.

Ear­lier this evening (or tech­ni­cally last night), walk­ing home after an impromptu din­ner at Tommy’s — a deli­cious deci­sion I’m glad I made — I was nearly hit by a man dri­ving a sil­ver Mer­cedes in excess of the speed limit through an inter­sec­tion, nar­rowly avoid­ing two other cars with the right-​of-​way that were cross­ing the inter­sec­tion, all while talk­ing on his phone. Luck­ily he was able to stop his vehi­cle about a foot and a half away from me as I made my way across the street (hav­ing the right-​of-​way) before he rapidly careened around, swerv­ing hur­riedly toward his des­ti­na­tion. The whole event likely lasted about 5 sec­onds, but my mind per­ceived the dura­tion to be much longer.

I shook my head and went on my way. It was not the only traf­fic haz­ard I had encoun­tered dur­ing that walk home.

I’ve spent the greater part of the last two weeks or so recov­er­ing data off of two exter­nal drives.

The first drive suc­cumbed to some sort of hard­ware fail­ure that I’m not entirely sure of quite yet. This par­tic­u­lar drive had failed a few months ago, but I sup­pose I was obsti­nate in believ­ing it was a mis­chance that wouldn’t repeat itself. I had rel­a­tively recent back­ups of that drive then, so I wasn’t too con­cerned about data being lost. I was also on a self-​imposed spend­ing freeze, antic­i­pat­ing upcom­ing trips to San Diego for Bat­tle on the Bank III, Las Vegas for Roller­Con 2010, and the not-​yet-​set-​in-​stone loom­ing move from Unit #312 to what would end up being #104. Per­sis­tency in my hope that the drive wouldn’t fail again, how­ever, didn’t pay off.

The sec­ond drive failed as a result of try­ing to recover data off of the first drive. Back­ups of the first drive were, at this point, far too old and I was find­ing that some files had become cor­rupted. This meant hav­ing to shuf­fle data around and pur­chas­ing a replace­ment drive. I decided to use this oppor­tu­nity to repar­ti­tion my func­tion­ing exter­nal drive. Hun­dreds of giga­bytes of data were moved around, defrag­mented and repar­ti­tioned. One of the shifts would up fail­ing, result­ing in the loss of one par­ti­tion. As chance would have it, I didn’t have a backup of that par­ti­tion. Mozy had, for rea­sons I’m not fully aware of nor care to under­stand at this point, marked that par­tic­u­lar backup for dele­tion result­ing in me hav­ing to pur­chase Data Res­cue in order to try to get a decent raw scan of the drive in the hopes of being able to pull files off of it. It’s been work­ing well so far, albeit slowly, and I’ve since moved to Back­blaze for my online backup solution.

It seems I should have replaced that first drive some time ago. Still, while it would have saved me this headache of a task, the learn­ing expe­ri­ence will most likely prove to be ben­e­fi­cial in the long-​run. At the very least, I dis­cov­ered just how lit­tle I should have depended on Mozy.

Sit­u­a­tions don’t always go accord­ing to plan as we would like them to. I’ve found that they rarely do. There’s a vast dif­fer­ence, how­ever, between mak­ing plans and set­ting goals. The best any­one can do is attempt to antic­i­pate every pos­si­bil­ity and try to be as pre­pared for uncer­tainty as they can. There’s only so much that luck can provide.

In my years as a pedes­trian, expe­ri­ence has taught me to be aware of my sur­round­ings, to open up my periph­eral vision, and to always pause a brief moment before cross­ing any street — even with the right-​of-​way. Chances are that sil­ver Mer­cedes would have zoomed past me at a safe dis­tance had I remem­bered to pause.

As luck would have it, I had good luck this time.