randomwisdom.com

So far my hearing hasn't improved at all. The dizziness isn't really getting worse but it's certainly not improving. It's hard to keep my hopes high. I want to just rewind the past week and do it over. It seems like I should wake up from this nightmare, but I can't. I'm burning all my reserves just to stay optimistic but no telling how long I'll hold out.

The silver lining is the bevy of cute nurses that visit me daily. That and phone calls from home are about the only things keeping me sane in here. Though I expect it will be tough explaining why I can't work as soon as I leave the hospital.

Long story short. I had a minor accident on Tuesday. Can't hear out of my right ear. In the hospital.

Well, I just got the bike back from the shop. From what I can understand, the stator coil was fried so the engine wasn't building up enough voltage to make a spark. They fixed it for free, and also did my first oil change, 3364km since I bought the bike. I rode to Sendai for a conference today and the throttle and shifter were notably smoother. They hadn't told me about the oil change but I could tell.

Getting back on after a week of no riding was refreshing. Everything was smooth as butter snicking up through the gears, dancing around kei cars and sedans. And it never fails to put a smile on my face, that feeling of solo flight, wind whipping at my neck, tires caressing the road, real freedom. It's truly magical.

When Ian first came to me with the idea of taking a motorcycle class I was a little reluctant. Then I realized the only thing keeping me from trying it was a general childhood reticence to do anything even slightly risky, a reticence that no longer seems to fit me. In other words, there WAS nothing stopping me, no good reason not to try. To hell with fear. Life is too short to discard your own potential triumphs.

Now I find myself telling people if they haven't tried it, they are missing out. My, how things change. The me from 5 years ago wouldn't recognize the me from today.

What better thing to do on a clear brisk Sunday than take a meandering tour through Miyagi? While I was too busy riding most of the time to take photos, I did stop at a couple points.

I don't do dirt, but I noticed this little track running off perpendicular to one of my regular nearby roads into an alpine meadow. This particular stretch is usually completely devoid of cars, and although it contains several blind corners, it's generally wide enough that I don't feel pressured to slow to a crawl.

From Naruko I kept riding east, following a rough route I had charted out before leaving. At a small town by a river, old men and father-son pairs alike were fishing. Not a bad way to spend a free day.

Soon enough, I had arrived at the ocean, greeted by an incredible view-- small rocky islands with tufts of pine trees growing like moss, fishing villages tucked into coves, and even a large beach or two. What I originally thought was a short seaside road bloomed into 60 kilometers of Pacific coast goodness. I was too much into the groove of riding to stop, but after a particularly torturous gauntlet of twisties I pulled over to take a break and a swig of soda. Apparently I was just north of Onagawa, near Ishinomaki. To the south lay Cobaltline, an extremely popular twisty bike road, but since my bike had been giving me some odd trouble (some engine sputter, trouble starting, and the engine actually flat out dying once) I decided to leave it for another day. I pulled into Ishinomaki and had dinner with my friends Michael and Sherry.

It was a good thing I skipped too, because as I left town in the evening my bike finally gave up and coughed out five minutes out of town. Some sporadic electrical connection kept the bike from starting back up. As it was 9:30pm by that point, the neighboring gas station had closed (!) and I phoned in to the bike dealership just 10 minutes before the poor guy was supposed to go home. He drove the company truck an hour out to where I was stranded while Mike and Sherry rode out on bicycles to keep me company. Yay for nice people. You guys rock.

So I hitched a ride back with the Red Baron guy, and we chatted about touring. That was my Sunday.

Repeat after me: MY DRIVE WILL CRASH TOMORROW. Think about that for a second: what would be running through your head if tomorrow you went to use your computer, only to find out your drive bit the big one? There go all your emails, your thesis work, your photos of your girlfriend, your SNES ROM collection, your accounting records. Gone. Could you think up curses in enough languages?

You NEED to back stuff up. It takes about 15 minutes once you have everything organized (and admittedly it's a LONG fifteen minutes) but WHEN one of your drives crashes-- and it WILL happen-- you'll be okay. Plus you have the added benefit of making a migration or a reformat easier.

Here's a list to make it easy. This has some details for a Windows backup, but most of it applies equally to a Mac or Linux install. Make your own list as you go along, so that when you do it again in a month or so it'll be easy.

EMAIL. If you use Thunderbird, get yourself a little tool called "MozBackup". (Don't rely on just copying the data files, it doesn't work. I've tried.) If you use Outlook Express you get to dig around in your Application Data hidden folder or some such bullshit.

DOCUMENTS. If you're organized, all of those, AND your source code for stuff, should be in your My Documents folder. If not, get your ass in gear and organize, at least to the point where all your important documents are in one place. Old tax programs in particular like to put their data files in the folder where they were installed. Ugh. Move those files somewhere they won't get lost-- with the rest of your documents. Also, get those old documents off your DESKTOP and into your DOCUMENTS folder. You can always make shortcuts on your desktop if you like to keep current projects at hand. Then zip that whole sucker up.

PHOTOS. In the same vein as the above, everything should be in the same place. Windows automatically creates a "My Photos" folder within "My Documents". Use it.

MUSIC. Ditto.

BOOKMARKS/FAVORITES. One of those things that you think would be slightly annoying but is actually insanely frustrating, as you struggle to google out all those sites which you visit often but don't know the address to. Save yourself the trouble, and back it up.

SAVEGAMES. Some games, like the Grand Theft Auto series, wisely place their savegames in the My Documents folder. Most don't. This is the most time-consuming part of my backup.

DOWNLOADS/PATCHES. I like to keep these on a separate CD because they don't tend to change that much. If you're a neat freak you might delete stuff as soon as you're done using it. Most people don't. So clean out that folder where you stick your downloads. It's amazing the crap you can find in there-- "Whoa, I still have the installer for last year's Firefox beta!" You might want to hold on to patches for older games, as they tend to be both large and pretty hard to find. If it's not important, clean it up, then start backin it up.

FINAL CHECK. Go through your list of programs, whether it's a list from the Start menu, Program Files, whatever. For each program, ask yourself, "If I had to reinstall this program from scratch, would I have everything?" For tax software that data includes all the tax data you put in manually. For games that data is your savegames. For SSH programs that data includes your private keys. Et cetera, ad nauseum.

OKAY. Now, take all that data that you've made a list of, and put it somewhere, off your hard drive. CDs, DVDs, external hard drives, hell I built myself a network server out of spare parts just for backup purposes. If you live in a floodplain or something idiotic like that, you probably want to use a waterproof storage medium.

Now you're done. Take comfort in the fact that WHEN things go sour, your stuff will be alright.