Always Backup!!

Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they agree to hold a contest with God as the judge.

They set themselves before their computers and begin. They type furiously for several hours, lines of code streaming up the screen.

Seconds before the end, a bolt of lightning struck taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over. He asks Satan to show what he has come up with.

Satan is visibly upset, and cries, “I have nothing! I lost it all when the power went out.”

“Very well, then,” says God, “let us see if Jesus fared any better.”

Jesus enters a command, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers.

Satan is astonished. He stutters, “But how?! I lost everything, yet
Jesus’ program is intact! How did he do it?!”

God chuckles, “Jesus saves.”

This joke came to my mind after lunch today as a vivid reminder of the panic I could have avoided before lunch....Okay, here's the story. I am an aspiring writer. I have several children's books written, along with 19 chapters of my first novel, and about 7 chapters of a young reader novel, a few short stories, and several poems. All of these are saved on a compact little zip drive. I keep this zip drive in a small holder, which clips into a mesh net on the inside of the case I carry my portable DVD player in. The case is with me always, at home and at work. Today at break I went to get my headphones out of my DVD case. I find that it is not zipped up. I also find my zip drive is not clipped to the mesh. Panic insues...I don't even worry about the fact that my DVD player could have fallen out and broken. All I can think of is that I have no back up for most of the stuff on this zip drive. I have paper copies of some of the items, but all that typing...argh!! So I paniced... I sent a text message to my mother-in-law to pleases check around my desk for the zip drive. She was helping out in my daughter's class room, but said she would look when she got home.

So as I waited to hear from her, I was trying to calculate how long it would take to retype all the lost material, and how much this would cut into my actual new writing. I remembered the scene in Little Women where Amy (a young Kristen Dunst) throws Jo's manuscript into the fire. I remembered the anger/agony in Jo (Winona Ryder) as she realized her work was gone. And i realized I was both Amy and Jo in this case...If my work was lost it was only me to blame. As I was eating my lunch, two and a half hours after the initial discovery, I received the message that my zip drive was safe on my desk. My two and a half hours of panic and fear and stress was over.

Oh, yeah, when I got home I made a back up!!

Computer expert by default

In my house I am the resident computer expert. With that said, let me give you a quick background about me and computers (or is it computers and I?) When I was in college my roommates Dave and Steve both majored in computers, an emerging field at the time. I majored in what I thought was something much more stable, communications (theatre/radio emphasis), thinking that computers were just a passing phase. Then Al Gore went and invented the internet, and computers went through the roof. Now most of the stuff I learned about radio is done by computers. (Oh to travel back in time and study computers).

Now for a shocking revelation from the computer expert of the house. I have never bought a new computer (hope to change that soon). My first computer was a used laptop my brother-in-law let me have. I had to buy a new power adapter for it, but didn't pay thing other than that. It worked fine for my writing, and for playing games. Really slow online, but it was okay. The computer I'm using now was my father-in-law's home computer. He got a new one two years ago or so, and I took over this one. It is 13 years old, and full of all kinds of junk I can't get rid of. "Why not," you ask? I don't know? 5 years ago or so, we flushed the memory and rebooted everything on it, and somehow, the guy who did this fix managed to lose our control panel (Can not get to it anywhere) and any time I try to delete or uninstall a program, it says I need to get clearance from my administrator... I have no administrator...what do I do?

Okay, you see my level of expertise. And let me be open with you, I have no clue when people start talking RAM and hard drive and MB or GB...Okay, I know a GB is bigger than an MB, and the higher the number the more space you have for storing junk on the computer. Other than a 6 hour class on Powerepoint I have never had any computer training. So how, you may ask have I become the computer expert? It is quite simple really, because I'm not afraid to do stuff. I teach myself. I print all the didgital photos our family takes (I use Paint Shop Pro, not photo shop) I make mini posters out of just about any picture my wife, mother-in-law or daughter find. And of course I'm the guy who can google anything (although Dakotah is also a darn good googler now).

The funny thing is because I take the time to learn stuff on the computer, everyone else gives me all the computer tasks, leaving me little time sometimes to do what I want to do (write, write, write). So the middle age guy on the old computer with no formal computer training is the man with all the computer answers in our house... I think our house is in trouble.