…this still remains one of my favorite places on campus, despite the fact that I’m not sitting against a wall. I always have this feeling that someone will be walking up behind me and just reading what I type while I’m none the wiser. Oh well. Paranoia aside, I’m feeling the need to update here because I’ve started to update my twitter like eight times today and I’ve only been awake for three hours.

So a few days ago I was following the hijinks that was indeed ensuing when Joel Watson (creator of the single best webcomic ever, Hijinks Ensue … see what I did there?) had the hard drive in his Pro crash. Tweet after tweet was popping up about it and his followers tried to assist him in saving files. His last backup was 2 weeks ago, and he thusly lost the .psds and print quality .jpgs of six comics. The blog he wrote after salvaging some data from the drive (in the freezer… apparently that works?) ended with the following message:

YOUR HARD DRIVE IS GOING TO DIE WITHOUT WARNING! THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO STOP IT! YOU CAN ONLY BE PREPARED WHEN IT HAPPENS! BACK ALL YOUR SHIT UP OR YOU WILL LOSE IT!

I became terrified. You all know me well–I stress that I “only” have a combined internal/external 500GB of storage. I’d like to have three drives capable of each holding all of my stuff, but one of them is just too small and I like to generally keep at least 30gb free on my laptop. Anyway, I made the decision to format my 60gig (Blue Sun. The light glows blue. I’m not very creative with drive-naming.) considering most of the data was on my big drive anyway. I proceed to divide all the data on my 320 between my laptop (The Detective) and Blue Sun. I’d then partition my big drive, use one volume for general storage and enable Time Machine with the other volume. This means that while that process was occurring, I’d only have one copy of each of my files, respectively. This thought terrified me. It was 2am, but I HAD TO DO IT NOW. I locked the cat in the bathroom so she wouldn’t touch wires and make something explode. Took a shower and cleaned to distract myself while everything was moved and pretended to study for a while and everything was fine. Eventually I stressed for five minutes after assigning volume sizes before pressing the “format and apply” button. Four-ish hours later, when I’d finally fallen asleep, TimeMachine had made a complete copy of my OS and drive… but I had to go to class and had no time to move anything back from Blue Sun, which contains almost EVERY.MUSIC.FILE. I have. They’re the only ones without a backup at this point, and I’m fairly scared. All I can think about is going to English at noon and running home to copy them back to the big drive before I go meet TS to demonstrate parallel parking.

Through all this, I learned two or three things about myself:

1. I’m insanely paranoid about data loss.
2. I’m CRAZY dependent on my laptop and should invest in a real boyfriend instead.

I’ll elaborate: As I got into bed trying to sleep while TimeMachine did it’s thing, I was insanely bored. I couldn’t browse the interwebs until my eyelids got droopy like usual. I couldn’t catch up on The Office or Clone High, which was what I’d originally planned for the night. Everyone was asleep like normal people so I had no one to talk to. Poopie was asleep. I was screwed. I put in a disc of How I Met Your Mother and still didn’t get sleepy. Counted my cameras, didn’t get sleepy. I finally got comfortable and fell asleep by just before 4. I woke up in the middle of the morning sometime and spazzed when it wasn’t on the other pillow or my side table. Usually I’d realize something like this and formulate some kind of digital rehab in my head, but I’m intelligent enough to acknowledge when something cannot be fixed; that would be like asking me to go without caffeine for a week–I’d be a walking headache and you all would hate me.

So now I sit on campus, so hyped up on said caffeine that I felt the need to tell you all that story. Mainly, when I split that drive I had to rename it… it never had a name. I decided I’d temporarily name them Marco and Polo, but then changed my mind to Sonny and Cher. If you read this, you should think about something appropriate for me to name the twin volumes because they will not “Got You Babe” forever, as it will eventually get on my nerves. (*Sidebar: I will not accept “Colbert” as a a name after the NASA incident. Though using Colbert and Stewart would be funny.)

Also, as everything was unfolding, I heard my mail alert go off. I put down the Astronomy book that I wasn’t reading only to open Mail and find a message from an old friend, sent via Livejournal. This is odd enough, considering my LJ updates are still fairly regular, but protected on a person-to-person basis and she can’t see most of my updates. Regardless, considering she was my best friend four-ish years ago and then we just lost contact, I was surprised to hear from her. Between looking at old photos during transfer and getting that message from her, I felt like I was in some sort of twilight zone timesuck. The message was oddly honest, and she apologized for being a creeper and “spying” on my current life, which I found humorous rather than creepy. I might meet her for coffee on Tuesday so we’ll see how that goes.

I’m about to actually “do” my English final, which simply consists of tweaking my Wiki article and adding a user page to my wikipedia account to meet word requirements. Then I’m gonna go to said English class, go meet TS for driving and lunch before seeing how the rest of the day unfolds.

I’m gonna finish drinking my latte and bite to eat now. Earlier I stood in line at Starbucks, Red Bull in hand. I got a strange look, and I suspect my existent beverage was the cause. I was so sleepy after last night’s events that I decided quick-draw caffeine was necessary, and dual-wielding was the best way to achieve it.

Time to focus on something else; I’m going to catch up on podcasts and hope no one thinks I’m strange for laughing out loud by myself. I guess there are worse things to be considered “strange” for, though.