Saturday, January 18, 2020

leaving the orifice now

I just spent four hours at the office, and now I'm leaving to take a walk out to the Jamshil Bridge and back to my place. All told, that ought to be nearly four hours' schlepping, and thanks to MyFitnessPal, I know that I'll end the day with about a 1200-calorie deficit.

We got word from on high that all of our computers will be reformatted and given spanking-new Windows 10 operating systems: Microsoft is apparently no longer supporting Windows 7, so we're getting Windows 10, which actually came out in 2015—five years ago. Whatever happened to Windows 8 and 9? What's up with the stupid and random numbering? Wasn't there a Windows XP a while back? Where on the number line is XP? The answers to all these questions are here. Now you know. And so do I.

Anyway, we were told to back up all of the files currently on our computers because, with the change in OS, everything on our computers would be wiped. I spent W32,900 on a 64-gigabyte thumb drive yesterday, and I successfully downloaded all my desktop data to the drive, but when I got greedy and also tried to copy over all the precious data in a Dropbox storage area that I used to use until a year ago, my computer started to go haywire. I'm guessing that, among the Dropbox files, we've got at least one corrupted file, and that's the cause of all the problems.

So, last night, I wasn't able to download anything from Dropbox, and I had effectively rendered my new thumb drive utterly useless. Nearly 33,000 won down the drain. The drive, every time I plugged it back into my office desktop, sent the desktop into conniptions and seizures. Ripping the USB out of its socket made the computer calm down at once. Go figure. I tried taking the thumb drive home to my MacBook Air and reformatting it to the standard "FAT" format used by most USB drives—my Mac can normally do such reformatting—but no dice: reformatting didn't work, and even simply trying to erase the data on the drive was impossible. So what else could I do? I threw the ruined drive out and resolved to buy a second thumb drive, this time with the intention of only downloading my desktop data. Dropbox is a minefield, so I'm happy to leave it alone.

At the same time, losing Dropbox is a significant thing: thanks to poor recordkeeping, my former boss and I no longer have the login and password information for the Dropbox I used to periodically access. Who owns and pays for the use of that Dropbox space is anyone's guess, and in a large company like mine, it's easy for paperwork to blow away in the breeze if you're not careful with it. Upshot: once I lose access to this particular Dropbox space, I'll never be able to get back into it. That thought is what had originally prompted me to try downloading Dropbox onto my thumb drive. That didn't work, thanks to corrupted files, so here we are. My ex-boss will be the only one with access to that Dropbox account (he'd better not log out—ever), and I'll lose all access. I sort of knew this day was coming; over the years, we had tried to find the relevant login/password information, but without success. I actually have a significant chunk of the Dropbox files in cloud storage on my Google Drive account (as a favor to my ex-boss, who needed to access the data while he was in Vietnam), so if my boss and I somehow lose all access to Dropbox, the loss won't be a total tragedy.

So I came into the office today to download my desktop files and catch up on a proofreading assignment that I'd been given. Four hours later, I'm good to go. So now, it's time for a dang walk. Stay sane, have a good Saturday, and use some armpit deodorant for once.



2 comments:

John Mac said...

Geez, one of the benefits to me being a techno-peasant I suppose. I never go "there" because I don't know how! Sorry for your troubles though.

So, speaking of the ex-boss, I assume your decision was to stay put?

Kevin Kim said...

I've said yes to the boss's offer, but it's going to be a while before anything happens. So for the moment, I just sit tight and endure.