Cataract Resin 58

I've been having a fucking shit time recently.

First up, I bought a whole shitload of stuff off eBay (which I couldn't really afford, but it was a good deal, so I splashed out). And guess what? That's right, it never turned up. So I'm £100 down waiting for that.

Second, I applied for a job at the local art gallery, but they never even bothered to send out an application form (as I wasn't dealing with the gallery directly, but with the city council, who are SHIT).

Thirdly, my computer went tits up and I've been soldiering on through the night to get it working. Things haven't been going well. But this last problem was essentially my fault.

Gather round, because I've a story to tell. Not a tremendously interesting story, but there's some morals hidden in there somewhere.

My friends and I play a fantasy football game called Bloodbowl. Try to imagine American Grid-iron football played by teams of Elves, Goblins and Ogres and you have some small idea of what the game is about. We have recently been organising a local Bloodbowl league. We've had a couple of leagues before hand, but this one is the biggest so far and naturally the most difficult to manage. In order to make it easier on myself and the other players, I decided to construct a website to manage the League. When completed, this page would offer all the players in the league full access to all the current team line-ups, fixtures, rumours etc. and provide a forum for them all to cuss each other down.

I started coding the page a few weeks ago. Now, due to my rigid code of computer-ethics (possibly the only rules and regulations that I am likely to ever follow), I am compelled to code the page in compliuance with the standards laid down by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This non-profit organisation exists to help the internet reach its full potential. You see, the wonderful thing about HyperText Markup Language (HTML - the language of the internet) is that you only need to code a webpage once, and users may view it using any compliant browser software on any platform, and the page will look the same. Or at least, that's the theory. The problem is, that very few browser manufacturers follow the W3C guidelines (Microsoft Internet Explorer being an example of a SHIT FUCKING BROWSER which does NOT adhere to the guidelines). Obviously, when viewed in these browsers, the Bloodbowl League website appears as it should do.

If there's one thing I can't fucking stand, it's when people use WYSIWYG editors to make a webpage that displays fine in Internet Explorer, but doesn't work in a proper browser because of monged code and proprietary tags. So I code all my websites up to W3C specification (XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS 2.0). In Opera, Mozilla, Firebird and other browsers the site looks fine. In Internet explorer, there's some issues with centring tables, but for the most part it looks OK, thanks to my hours of dicking about and compromising to get code which displays in IE and still adheres to W3C guidelines.

Then I had a thought. Sure, it all looks good in Windows 2000, but what about other operating systems? What would it look like in Konqueror (the integrated browser in Linux's KDE environment)? So I decided to install the most recent version of the Mandrake Linux Distro on my machine. I downloaded the OS from the mandrake website (it's free, see?) and started installing Version 10.0. I'd installed version 9.1 a long time ago, but hadn't used it much, so I repartitioned hard disks and whatnot and set it all going. After a few hours my machine was all Linuxed up, and I was able to check the website. Success! It looked as it should.

Now came the troubles. Time to load up Win2k again and carry on working. Time to load up Win2k. TIME TO LOAD UP WIN2K!!! Something had gone wrong and Win2k wouldn't boot. Damn. So I tried all manner of fixes, including writing a new bootsector on both my hard disks and updating the master boot record. Nothing worked. Last resort: I connected a dusty old 2gig hard disk to my machine, and started partitioning and formatting, with the hope of installing Win2K on that one and salvaging what I could from the other HDD's. But I guess that old Disk has been sitting around for too long, because it was totally fucked.

What to do? I disconnected all my hard disks, connected my second hard disk as the primary master, and used a Windows 98 Boot disk to boot to DOS. After this, I was able to partition and format the disk (which erased all the data on it, some 20 gigs or so), and install Windows 2000. I then connected my old primary disk as the secondary and was thankfully able to save all the data held thereon (some 38 gigs or so).

Why am I bothering to tell you all this? Because there are some lessons in it. And they're not obvious ones. Many people keep their entire life on their computers, never backing up important files. Because of this, when something goes wrong (and believe me, something ALWAYS goes wrong), they lose everything and are completely devastated. I give a fuck of course, it's their own damned fault. Anything important like that, you should back up daily to Zip Disk, and monthly to CD-ROM. The only things I had on my Hard Disk which I was bothered about trying to save was the website source and some video game saves (but the game saves were of secondary importance even then). If it wasn't for that I'd have quite happily re-partitioned and formatted and clean installed without giving a flying fuck about losing the data (You should do this every year or so as a matter of course anyway, it keeps your computer tidy and running nicely). The fact that I hadn't backed up my important data caused me to get stressed trying to save it. Which leads me onto the next point.

Besides regularly backing up important work, you really should make sure you have back-ups ready before you try anything major with your computer. Installing a new program is usually low-risk, of course, but when it comes to formatting disks, converting filesystems, or INSTALLING NEW OPERATING SYSTEMS, it's imperative that you've backed up everything you need externally (I put those caps in to remind myself how much of a fucking dickhead I was installing an EXPERIMENTAL release of Linux without backing up my system first).

So there you go. Back up your important work regularly, because if you don't, you've got absolutely no fucking excuse if you lose everything due to your own meddling. I've learned my lessons. I suspect that most of you reading though will ignore my advice and end up learning the hard way. Maybe tomorrow my system will be back up and running the way it was before.