Just Catching Up (Gerrit) (Archive)

It's been a few weeks since either Erin or I have posted, so we figured we'd get you caught up with what's going on...

School has been very intense, especially for Erin. I know she's taking two classes and doing research hours, on top of working. She is teaching spanish classes at a preschool in Auburn, and is also volunteering at the local public library.

I'm a little better off, I'm in two classes and working about 15-20 hours a week. I'm still working as a web developer for the Southern Rural Development Center, in addition to managing and developing websites for my small business, Inversion Web Studios.

Recently I've had the privilege of being able to offer to make websites for several great friends of mine and erin's who are also getting married. This idea of having a couple having a website seems to be catching on!

One of the more interesting things that has happened to me in the past week is having computer issues... I recently decided to reformat my hard drive and just wipe everything off, as I'd heard it was a wonderful thing to do if your computer was being slow, sluggish, and abnormally weird. I carefully made several backups of all the important things on my computer and then wiped the drive clean.

Despite a few very minor issues getting everything set back up, I thought everything had gone really smoothly! That is... until I tried to open the files I'd restored from my external Hard Drive onto my computer.

For some reason, I couldn't get access to some of the files in the restored "My Documents" folder! I was a little freaked out, because I put all of my web site files in there. I did some research, tried everything I could think of to get them open, and finally decided to take it to the computer shop here in Starkville to see if they could fix it.

After several days of waiting, the told me that somehow I (or some program on my computer) had chosen to encrypt the "My Documents" folder. Unfortunately, this meant that while I had all the files on my newly formatted computer, that they were "loyal" to the pre-wiped version of my computer and there was no way to decrypt them on my post-wiped version of my computer.

While there were a lot of things that I did lose, the worst part was losing my pictures and my layered Photoshop documents... neither of which can really be replaced.

So... now I'm just getting things back on my computer that I can and enjoying having my laptop back in my possession...