by Nathan Stout
Ok, this guy walks into a bar…
Season 3 was destined NOT TO TAKE PLACE. That’s all there is to say about it. The fates have conspired to stop it. There is something in there that is so apocryphal that the very fabric of the universe is threatened. The powers that be have been sent to stop it at all costs.
As you all may well know or not know, the great hard drive disaster that took place in late April set us back a bit. You can read about it here, here, and finally here. The drive fell over on my desk and poof, all that work was gone in a flash. As you read the final post I reconstructed the data that was here and there until I got as close as I could.
I started working on Episode 1 of Season 3 first off. That was the project that I could knock out the quickest and have a little ‘Dave Ramsey mini victory’. This would get me motivated to get back to the Season 2 stuff.
Fast forward to night before last. I am 95% done with Episode 1 of Season 3 (again). I got the rough edit done. I would need to rebuild the intermission, close credits, and do all the special effects and I would be done. This might take another week or two.
VALHALLA – DAY
Jehovah walks up to the front door and knocks. Mighty Odin answers the door.
ODIN
Well, well. What brings you here to the mighty
hall of Odin?
JEHOVAH
We have an issue.
ODIN
I am a little amused that we gods of long ago
who have been all but forgotten we would have
ANY issue.
JEHOVAH
Forgotten? Speak for yourself.
ODIN
Eh, just give them another hundred years.
You’ll be in here eating with Buddha, Zeus,
and all the others every other Thursday.
JEHOVAH
Huh?
ODIN
Every other Thursday is Deity potluck.
JEHOVAH
Never mind that! We have a problem. I
speak of ULTIMATE JOKE.
Odin raises an eyebrow in surprise.
JEHOVAH
IT has been written.
ODIN
Thor’s balls!
JEHOVAH
Exactly. We need to do something about
it.
ODIN
Send you son.
JEHOVAH
He’s been busy packing for the second
coming for the last four hundred years.
Look, there is three… well one of me. You
have all sorts of kin. I need you do some-
thing about it.
Odin shakes his head in disbelief.
ODIN
If that joke is released on the world…
JEHOVAH
Exactly.
ODIN
Leave it to me. I can put Loki to use.
FADE OUT
That’s what happened. I swear. So I am working on the show in my ‘office’ room. For those of you who know my place know this as the room with the thick blue carpet. My office used to be in the far back bedroom with the short tan carpet.
If you will recall in a post I made about getting motivated to do the show, you will recall that I thought that if I moved my office to the blue carpet room it would be cooler and I would be more motivate to work in there longer (on the show). Well… when I was in the back room I would place the external hard drives on the floor off to the side of the desk. I started putting them on the floor (laying down) after the hard drive disaster.
Now that I moved into the blue carpet room I placed my hard drives ontop of my computer tower (which sits on the floor under the desk) because the carpet is thick and would cause an overheating problem with the drives if I laid them on the floor.
You know where this is going, right?
So Monday night I worked on the show and got to that 95% point. During my editing I noticed my two external drives were getting REALLY hot lying flat ontop of my computer. I put them on their side (like I used to do before the crash). That is to say I put them up on their side so they were standing upright. This cooled them down quote a bit.
I finished for the night and reached down to turn them off and…
Loki, the god of mischief made me knock the ‘reconstructed’ hard drive over.
Just like before.
Exactly like before.
Twice in less than two months.
You have got to be fucking kidding me….
The hard drive didn’t make those noises that the one terabyte drive did… but it did stop working.
That is how I came to the conclusion that the gods are conspiring against me to stop Season 3 from happening.
What does this mean I will do next? Should I send the hard drive out to a data recovery place.
HA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have a duplicate hard drive here that I will swap platters in and TRY to recover the data on my own. If I can’t get it back I will basically be back where I was after the first major crash and episode 1 will have to be done for a 3rd time.
I am considering cutting my losses and stopping there. Once again the idea of a one-story line show has caused all this. If we had just been doing one-off sketches there wouldn’t be all this catching up to do.
Curse you Loki!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I lost two externals in about a year period. The lesson I took away from that is to use those drives sparingly, basically just as intermediate storage. If you have to do a lot of work on something keep that data on your internal drives. And if what you're doing there is mission critical stuff back it up to the externals every so often. But other than that, the externals are powered down 99.97% of the time.
The other lesson is redundant backups. I thought we had this discussion after the last crash. Save the raw video to another hard drive or to DVD. Save the project file in more than one place. It may be more work if nothing goes wrong, but so far the time saved in recovery would have far offset the time in backup. Twice over now.