Back on Track

The Education of Gareth continues on.

I am very thankful that I was able to find the hard copy of chapter one. Transcribing chapter two was very time-consuming. I read very fast, even when out loud, so I was having to pause the video every few phrases to ensure that I wouldn't forget. But, it is done, and I have continued on.

I have been reminded throughout this process of my college days, when I worked at Mortensen Library. Especially during the cram periods, the computer lab was always filled with students frantically trying to finish up papers. I worked at the Circulation desk, and more than once I had a student run up to me to report that their paper had suddenly been deleted, or their computer had mysteriously crashed. "I'd been working on that paper for 6 hours!" one might say. Or, equally heart-rending: "I just lost 15 pages of my term paper!" My answer was almost always the same, and, as I recall, I always said it with a sigh.

"Did you save the file to the desktop? Never save it to the desktop."

Now, this story doesn't quite equate to my situation. No, I didn't save EoG to the desktop, I saved it to a flashdrive. But, I was transferring that flashdrive between my modern, updated, Windows 7 laptop and the piece of crap they make us use at work. Which has since been sent away for a rather funky malfunction. Still, I can still hear my own voice echoing in my head. Why didn't I save it to multiple places?! It's a habit I gained while in college, in the midst of hearing horror stories and having computers crashing on me while I tried to get my own work done. I have four or five different saved copies of Snow Falls Slowly. The problem with this is that it becomes rather difficult to figure out which one is the most recently updated, and then to go back and update the rest, or copy over them. It's very time-consuming, and I thought, "hey, I'm not in college anymore, I shouldn't have to worry about such things anymore." But clearly I'm still having this problem.

I think, however, I have found a solution. I had fixed up the first chapter of EoG at work. Instead of pulling out my trusty (or not so trusty) flash drive, I simply emailed the document to myself. That way, it's always on gmail, and therefore easily accessible should something (G Forbid!) happen to it. I'm thinking that, every so often, I'll burn all the copies onto a cd and label them as I do my versions of reports I do at work: EoG2.8.10, EoG2.11.10, and so forth. All I can do is hope nothing happens to my gmail account.