First, check the power.
I don't talk about it much, but in a previous life (as i think of it), I was in the Air Force. Well, a lot of people probably know I was in the military, but I was a technical person. I started out as what was called an "instrumentation mechanic" but what it boiled down to was I was an R&D electronics technician. Instrumentation is used to measure things in experiments, so that's where the term comes from, although I always thought "mechanic" was an odd juxtaposition of words, but it makes sense. I built things, I fixed things, I made them run right.
My tech school, after basic training in San Antonio, TX (yes, Texas in June, everyone's favorite), was almost nine months long in Denver, CO. I spent five days a week for almost seven months learning about circuit design, soldering, fabrication and repair. I've probably forgotten a lot of it. But one of the things that's always stuck in my mind was the way you go about troubleshooting a problem. Whether it's a circuit you built from an engineer's drawing that you turn on for the first time or something that was working and then broke, you first check the power. You'd be surprised how many times you think something's broken and it turns out the plug was pulled out the wall.
This comes to me now for a couple of reasons. Ostensibly (and what compelled me to bore you with this post) was my networked hard drive stopped working a little over a week ago. The little light indicated power was on, and it blinked. Like most apple-related products, it's white, very pretty, and doesn't give you a whole lot of anything but sleek surface with a button and some ports and a light. So I knew my hard drive wasn't working. I took it away from the router and tried attaching it to my studio computer to see if I could do some diagnostics. All I could get from my system was "it's there" but not being able to access it.
At this point, I'm starting to freak a little. As a former Sysadmin, I should know better than anyone that you always back up your stuff. Guess who didn't. It happens. But what's on the drive is a collection of recordings of Cantab poet features and various other events (Harpoon Brewery and North Beast Slam shows, mainly) going back to 2007. The only copies of them, in many cases. So although I didn't say anything to anyone, you can imagine my panic. A lot of them haven't even been worked on, just put there. It's something that needs to be rectified.
Finally, I decided to do what I knew - check the power. It's on, but is it *right*? I went in the cellar and got my father's Fluke multimeter. It was in his things that I went through after he died, and I've always wanted one of them - they're expensive, beautiful devices that are very accurate. He was also an electronics person - we could get into a discussion of nature/nurture here about why my electronics aptitude scores were so high and they pushed me into the Instrumentation Mechanic job, but that's too much of a digression even for me - so it made sense that he had something this nice for what he did himself. It wasn't for his job; he hadn't worked in years due to his disability (severe back pain and problems after repeated car accidents over the years). So I took my father's multimeter, and checked the pins on the power connector - two different voltages involved, and one of them was fluctuating wildly within the range. Power supplies, as anyone who's had to fix a computer knows, are probably one of the first points of failure.
So I got online and ordered a new power supply from LaCie. It got here today, and I hooked it up. Although I knew on an intellectual level it would work, there was a part of me that was really scared - would it fix the problem? It's not completely irrational - the power fluctuation could have damaged internal components. But a large part of it was just knowing I hadn't done what I should have done - backed things up.
As soon as I plugged in the power, it turned on and immediately the icon showed up on my desktop. I opened up the folder "Cantab Live Files" and looked - 74 items. All of it I would have lost if the hard drive was toast. I felt like I'd dodged a bullet.
This weekend, I came back into the studio. I haven't been in here working in a long time. I haven't made a mix since I moved here - not one that I've planned out, recorded and mastered. I haven't been regularly processing poet recordings - a few for friends, some things for last year's team CD (Simone's coming over next week to work on the one for this year), and I am needing to pull out the likely candidates for her before she comes.
I'm ready now. A part of me wasn't for a long time - I had to heal after being single again, finally getting on firm footing with my PTSD and depression, my father's death and learning how my mother kept him out of my life when I needed him so much. But now my power source is back and ready, and I'm driven to create again. It's as though fixing this problem was the final point on it - I can do so much, I have so much knowledge and so many tools available to me waiting to use them. With a mindful awareness of what I'm blessed to have and a realization of the things that are just now coming into my life to inspire me, I'm going to do my best to move forward into what I believe will be a period of great personal growth and creation.
Some people are late bloomers - maybe it just takes us time and trial to get the right energy to move forward in that way that brings out our full potential.
My tech school, after basic training in San Antonio, TX (yes, Texas in June, everyone's favorite), was almost nine months long in Denver, CO. I spent five days a week for almost seven months learning about circuit design, soldering, fabrication and repair. I've probably forgotten a lot of it. But one of the things that's always stuck in my mind was the way you go about troubleshooting a problem. Whether it's a circuit you built from an engineer's drawing that you turn on for the first time or something that was working and then broke, you first check the power. You'd be surprised how many times you think something's broken and it turns out the plug was pulled out the wall.
This comes to me now for a couple of reasons. Ostensibly (and what compelled me to bore you with this post) was my networked hard drive stopped working a little over a week ago. The little light indicated power was on, and it blinked. Like most apple-related products, it's white, very pretty, and doesn't give you a whole lot of anything but sleek surface with a button and some ports and a light. So I knew my hard drive wasn't working. I took it away from the router and tried attaching it to my studio computer to see if I could do some diagnostics. All I could get from my system was "it's there" but not being able to access it.
At this point, I'm starting to freak a little. As a former Sysadmin, I should know better than anyone that you always back up your stuff. Guess who didn't. It happens. But what's on the drive is a collection of recordings of Cantab poet features and various other events (Harpoon Brewery and North Beast Slam shows, mainly) going back to 2007. The only copies of them, in many cases. So although I didn't say anything to anyone, you can imagine my panic. A lot of them haven't even been worked on, just put there. It's something that needs to be rectified.
Finally, I decided to do what I knew - check the power. It's on, but is it *right*? I went in the cellar and got my father's Fluke multimeter. It was in his things that I went through after he died, and I've always wanted one of them - they're expensive, beautiful devices that are very accurate. He was also an electronics person - we could get into a discussion of nature/nurture here about why my electronics aptitude scores were so high and they pushed me into the Instrumentation Mechanic job, but that's too much of a digression even for me - so it made sense that he had something this nice for what he did himself. It wasn't for his job; he hadn't worked in years due to his disability (severe back pain and problems after repeated car accidents over the years). So I took my father's multimeter, and checked the pins on the power connector - two different voltages involved, and one of them was fluctuating wildly within the range. Power supplies, as anyone who's had to fix a computer knows, are probably one of the first points of failure.
So I got online and ordered a new power supply from LaCie. It got here today, and I hooked it up. Although I knew on an intellectual level it would work, there was a part of me that was really scared - would it fix the problem? It's not completely irrational - the power fluctuation could have damaged internal components. But a large part of it was just knowing I hadn't done what I should have done - backed things up.
As soon as I plugged in the power, it turned on and immediately the icon showed up on my desktop. I opened up the folder "Cantab Live Files" and looked - 74 items. All of it I would have lost if the hard drive was toast. I felt like I'd dodged a bullet.
This weekend, I came back into the studio. I haven't been in here working in a long time. I haven't made a mix since I moved here - not one that I've planned out, recorded and mastered. I haven't been regularly processing poet recordings - a few for friends, some things for last year's team CD (Simone's coming over next week to work on the one for this year), and I am needing to pull out the likely candidates for her before she comes.
I'm ready now. A part of me wasn't for a long time - I had to heal after being single again, finally getting on firm footing with my PTSD and depression, my father's death and learning how my mother kept him out of my life when I needed him so much. But now my power source is back and ready, and I'm driven to create again. It's as though fixing this problem was the final point on it - I can do so much, I have so much knowledge and so many tools available to me waiting to use them. With a mindful awareness of what I'm blessed to have and a realization of the things that are just now coming into my life to inspire me, I'm going to do my best to move forward into what I believe will be a period of great personal growth and creation.
Some people are late bloomers - maybe it just takes us time and trial to get the right energy to move forward in that way that brings out our full potential.