From the department of Lost and Found
For a little while there I thought that I had lost my treasured eight gigabyte thumb drive. For anyone who doesn't know me that's a big deal. Like leave my cave and chase after short fuzzy people while muttering about a "precious" or some damn thing, kind of big deal. Not for any bad reason, either; I keep most of my writing on this thing. I don't save much of anything locally anymore. Most of my writing is either done in Zoho Office, or it's done in another program like Celtx or MS Word (though lately I've been thinking of switching to OpenOffice.org) and saved to my thumb drive. With that in mind you can imagine that losing it was a bummer. Also for those who don't already know me, I teach a martial arts class. Well, that night I had to go by the home of my assistant instructor because he had been kind enough to drive that night, and my cell phone had fallen out in his car. I thought something similar might have happened with my thumb drive. My thought was, in my hurry to get ready for class (as I was running late that night) I might have slipped it into the pocket of my training pants, which is something I never, ever do. At any rate, I didn't find it right away so I figured it gone. What bothered me about this more than the thought of losing years and years of writing was the possibility that I'm capable of being so incredibly careless. If I can fail myself to that extent, how might I have failed someone I care about, and to what degree. The question still haunts me. However, I did end up finding the errant flash drive. It had fallen into the laundry bag next to our bed. Since finding it I've undertaken to copy all the writing that is most important to me to a file folder in my Google Apps account. I'll update these files periodically. I've also created a DropBox account and copied my most important files to this folder as well. The question of my potential for carelessness still haunts me, but the story ultimately has a happy ending and a valuable lesson.
This strip will take a little explaining. A while back I had this really awful dream, the kind of dream that sort of makes you wish you could scour your brain. In this dream I was the kind of guy that might make you long for the days when public hangings of criminals were more commonplace. The kind of guy that the good people of a small town get together to quietly lynch, then bury in dotty old Mildred's petunia bed. In this dream I verbally abused and badly beat my wife, all of which was witnessed by another woman in the room who ran for it to call the cops. To stop this second woman from calling the cops, this dream sociopath version of me gave pursuit with the intention of beating her to death. Charming isn't it? Needless to say I woke up breathing heavily, covered in sweat, my hands shaking, and just repeating over and over, "What the fuck was THAT all about?" Later, though, as I was thinking about it, something funny occurred to me. I know, "beating your wife then murdering the witness, that's fucking HILARIOUS!" stay with me here. Most of the time I think I'm a pretty decent guy. I'd even go so far as to say I'm one of the good guys. If I can have a dream like that, what do bad guys dream about? I mean really bad guys. What do murdering sociopaths who kick puppies have nightmares about? Do they wake in a cold sweat from horrible dreams of...selling cookies at a bake sale? Helping a blind person with their grocery shopping? Quilting? That struck me as kind of funny, which lead me to today's Geek Speak.