Inside Jeff Overturf's Head: "Of Hard Drives and Illuminati!" 1 of 2

Earlier this year my external hard drive went "Kerfloobie"...at least that's the technical term. Luckily a good friend and devoted blog reader, Marco had the ability to get it going again.

I had quite the ordeal nontheless.

The story of the loss, the return and when the devil wants his due...

As we join our hero, the lonely blogster, it is day 6 since his ordeal with the little comatose external hard drive began.

Suffering from digital withdrawal, he sits in the cold, beige halls of the computer hospital, waiting for the computer teams from DARPA and JPL to do their binary magic and hopefully resuscitate his little black box of "stuff". Doctors and nurses "on call" do their best to comfort him while he waits outside the OR.

Big deal. You've lost 66 gigabytes of music. You still have all your CD's in storage, you'll get most of your stuff back!

You've lost 95 gigs of "Oldtime Radio" shows. Allot of them are available through individual collectors out there. You'll be able to get most of them back.

You've lost 125 gigs of comic book and strip scans. There are file share sites out there that house this stuff. You'll be able to get a few of them back.

It's just "stuff", Jeff. Sure you've invested the last 13 or 14 years culminating these digital pearls, but they're just "stuff". And haven't we learned a valuable lesson about "backing up" your "backup"?

The drama deepens. What emotional scars will this leave our once wistful blogster?

May the Flying Spaghetti Monster guide those techs hands well.

R'Amen!

Cartoon character note: The nurse above may look a little like one of Jeffy's Angels, but you can tell she's not because she has on sensible shoes.

The mouring continues...

Patiently and helplessly waiting for his crack computer staff to revive his downed external hard drive and recover the treasures stored in the lost data, our erstwhile blogster seeks comfort from his spiritual advisers.

Jesus only had his boss's tough love to dish out...

The Flying Spaghetti Monster gave me an empathetic pat on the head with his noodly appendage...but he seemed a little drunk, so maybe he was just touching me to find his bearings...

And Superman showed off his newly discovered power of "Super Aloofness"...damn our yellow sun and the powers and abilities it affords him...

I feel a little like Linus without his blanket.

Keep your fingers crossed for the boys in the "clean room" working feverishly sorting out all those "ones" and "zeros". As pitiful as I may appear above, I am the eternal optimist!

GODSPEED to you of binary magic! I have the faith in the matrix!!!

Help arrives!!!

Our withering blogster, still reeling in anguish from the apparent suicide death of his external hard drive, wanders the streets aimlessly. Unsure of how to live his life without his treasured MP3's, CBR's, JPEG's and MVE's, he staggers down a dark alley where...

Yes, my hard drive inaccessibility was apparently software oriented and not a hardware based issue, and my old friend, co-worker and blog-reader Marco was able to use his binary Jedi skills to pull her back from the edge of darkness.

I know that in this age of great personal tragedy and loss, this era of earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, Mexicali and Sumatra, that my trivial collection of geek treasures is a small matter...but hell...there mine.

Excuse the lateness in the day that I finally got this post up, but I've spent the last 10 hours backing up my back-up. So to the folks out there who have given me their kind words, thank you and rest assured all my junk is now safely doubly backed up on 2 computers and 3 external drives and I have them all safely stored in the engine room here at blog headquarters.

Right next to that big turbine generator.

With the huge electro-magnets at each pole.

Crap.

See you tomorrow...I have something to do.

Sigh.

Enjoying the return of what I'd lost...

Now that I lived through my own personal data loss hell and successfully (with the help of my buddy Marco) got it back. I'm going to take my recovered drive and my 2 back-ups for my back-ups for a run. They've been cooped up too long and they're feeling frisky, so I'm taking the day off from my blog to take them to the park for a run!

I'll actually be organizing my stuff and getting wires tucked away and other nonsense.

But it turns out that I had danced, and the piper didn't like my moves!

Bless Jeffy's Angels...my first line of defense...

But my seeming safety was short-lived...

Our story thus far...Bigfoot and Bob, the Alien rejoin the "Mysterious Shadowy Figure" back inside "The Drink Hole"...