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Gleep

  • Jan. 5th, 2007 at 12:14 PM
Spain
"Gleep" is a word from my distant past, from my college days in the chess club at Northwestern University. It's what you say when you suddenly realize that you have have just made a very bad move, your opponent has just made a very good move, and/or your position is hopelessly lost. Started as the favorite expression of one guy, but the whole club soon picked it up and started using it, and GLEEP actually became the name of our NU chess club newsletter.

I hadn't uttered a "gleep" in decades, but one escaped my lips this morning, when I sat down and logged on to AOL and suffered some sort of strange computer hiccup... after which, suddenly, my Personal Filing Cabinet and Favorite Places were both completely empty.

More than three thousand emails and a couple of hundred bookmarks wiped out in the blink of an eye.

Gleep.

This sort of thing used to happen every six months or so with the early versions of AOL, but the more recent versions seemed to have fixed the problem, and I haven't had my bookmarks or filing cabinet vanish on me since 1998. I thought the system was finally stable, and got a bit complacent, I guess.

Of course, there are now automatic backups built in to the system, and of course I have been trying to use them all morning, to see if I can get anything back. So far, no good. In the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, as I was still trying to figure out what had happened, four new emails arrived in about a minute. I deleted them and went back to troubleshooting. Unfortunately now, when I try the restore function, it just seems to restore the four post-gleep emails, and not the thousands of older ones that were sitting in my filing cabinet last night.

I haven't given up yet, but I am starting to feel glum.

Some days I truly hate computers.

Lest anyone have a heart attack, let me hasten to add that this has NOT affected A DANCE WITH DRAGONS or any of my other work-in-progress. I do my writing on a completely different computer than the one I use for email and the internet, in part to guard against viruses, worms, and nightmares like this. My work machine does not even use Windows (which I loathe). I write with WordStar 4.0 on a pure DOS-based machine. Mock if you must... but WordStar and DOS are both stable as rocks, and never give me the sort of headaches I get from Windows. (I won't even talk about Microsoft Word, about which I have nothing printable to say).

So my novel is safe. It's just my emails that are lost.

I suppose, if I can't fix this, I could try to look at it as a sort of liberation. Last night I had more than three thousand emails awaiting answers. This morning I have none.

Comments

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[info]geek_domestic wrote:
Jan. 5th, 2007 09:29 pm (UTC)
Me, personally, would look at it as liberation.

If it was important, they'll email you again. :)

For what it's worth, I rather figured that anybody with common sense would figure that you kept your novels on a different, 100% isolated from outside world computer. At least you anticipated the gobs of "Oh my god! DWD!" comments, ha.
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[info]bunegeria wrote:
Jan. 5th, 2007 09:31 pm (UTC)
wow, just yesterday I installed the update to Internet Explorer, and then I couldn't get use it, as soon as I opened a page it froze and sent an error message, if I went through the update windows option to the mircosoft page, I could move to one more page before it froze, I tried clicking on the page that said talk to a person on the phone, which took me to a page that said wouldn't you rather send an email.
finally I had to uninstall it, so, my experience is not helpful to you at all, but I really hate microsoft.
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[info]curious_wolf wrote:
Jan. 5th, 2007 09:43 pm (UTC)
lol Gleep sounds like a better word for it than the silent swearing and gestures my team went for. At least we always came away laughing from the matches
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[info]dracothelizard wrote:
Jan. 5th, 2007 09:46 pm (UTC)
"this has NOT affected A DANCE WITH DRAGONS or any of my other work-in-progress. I do my writing on a completely different computer than the one I use for email and the internet, in part to guard against viruses, worms, and nightmares like this."

Thank heavens! After having just finished A Feast For Crows I don't think having wait to even longer would do me well. And the seperate computer thing's quite clever!
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[info]shsilver wrote:
Jan. 5th, 2007 09:53 pm (UTC)
Is not "Gleep" the favored word of the dragon in Robert Asprin's "Myth" series?
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[info]youngest_son wrote:
Jan. 5th, 2007 10:31 pm (UTC)
I almost want to think that's the dragon's name...but it's been a while since I've read the series.
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(no subject) - [info]jmichiko - Jan. 5th, 2007 10:32 pm (UTC) Expand
(no subject) - [info]minwee - Jan. 5th, 2007 10:43 pm (UTC) Expand
[info]papersky wrote:
Jan. 5th, 2007 10:00 pm (UTC)
I write in DOS too!

I thought I was the only person left in the world who did. How very cheering to see that I'm not.

I hope your Windows irritations are cleared up as soon as possible.
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[info]a_steep_hill wrote:
Jan. 5th, 2007 10:04 pm (UTC)
but WordStar and DOS are both stable as rocks, and never give me the sort of headaches I get from Windows.

OS X also has this advantage... I'm just saying, is all.
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[info]hendrikboom wrote:
Jan. 6th, 2007 03:12 pm (UTC)
Debins stable also does,
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[info]elmyra wrote:
Jan. 5th, 2007 10:25 pm (UTC)
Eeep! Hope you manage to restore it! (And glad the novel is safe. :-)
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[info]kingofmars wrote:
Jan. 5th, 2007 10:27 pm (UTC)
That happened to me in November. Except I actually DID lose my writings. Good thing that's not the case for you. Stay strong!
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(Anonymous) wrote:
Jan. 5th, 2007 10:32 pm (UTC)
Indeed for most tasks OSX or better yet. Open standards, open source and Free. Linux.

Not that I really think you'd be interested.

As for your DOS box you use for writing. If it ain't broke don't fix it.
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(Anonymous) wrote:
Jan. 5th, 2007 10:57 pm (UTC)
Getting emails back
my sister's boyfriend actually builds computer software for a living and has fixed this kind of problem for me before. I can email him about how to restore all that stuff if you haven't retrieved your mail by the end of the day. In the mean time I would view every C:// folder you have and see if there aren't cookies or files or something that you can spot your stuff on. You can also call AOL and demand they trouble shoot the problem. They should know what's wrong (and if they don't...well, I don't think I have to finish that sentence).
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[info]thefirstalicat wrote:
Jan. 5th, 2007 10:59 pm (UTC)
Gleep is a good word, I must find a way to use it!

Sorry to hear about your lost email, hope none of it was too important!

I remember WordStar fondly - it was my first WP program - but I've never had any problems with MS Word, to be honest. And Windows XP seems pretty stable....
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(Anonymous) wrote:
Jan. 5th, 2007 11:06 pm (UTC)
Solution
Never mind! Talked to my boss here at IGN.com who's a big computer gee...good person to ask about these things. :p He says that if you have AOL on your computer (i.e. you inserted a disk and uploaded it onto your computer) there SHOULD be a folder with AOL stuff somewhere on your C drive that saves all that stuff. Some of its tricky to find but it's there. If your info is just on the web, sometimes after like a month AOL will delete your stuff, but even if you just have AIM now usually you can access your old information so it shouldn't dissapear. Good luck!
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(Anonymous) wrote:
Jan. 5th, 2007 11:19 pm (UTC)
Too late about the heart attack... but I'm in stable condition now.
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[info]kalimeg wrote:
Jan. 5th, 2007 11:27 pm (UTC)
I can tell your first commenter has never called AOL. I am shocked that you still use it. If you want a Gmail invitation, I'd be glad to send you one. It is a lot more reliable.
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[info]dhd_jr wrote:
Jan. 6th, 2007 12:36 am (UTC)
my 2 cents
Ser George...I would recommend using a Mac...they don't crash. I'm a graphic designer who lays out publications all the time, therefore I would also recommend more sophisticated software like InDesign or QuarkXPress (very good for handling large, multiple-page documents). I just know you would love the difference.

cheers and good luck...love your books
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[info]imagine_bgp wrote:
Jan. 6th, 2007 12:43 am (UTC)
By the time I got to the bottom of the post where it is explained that this problem would be, as they say, transparent to we book- awaiting fans, my heart was already pounding. Man, I so thought the post was working it's way up to some kind of 'sorry, folks'. Yipe!
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[info]chrisbillett wrote:
Jan. 6th, 2007 01:08 am (UTC)
I agree with you about computers (and dammit - I work with them!) and oh, oh, oh how I despise Microsoft Word and it's incessant ability to bug the hell out of me.

"No, office, I didn't want that capitalised... no, I didn't mean that wor... fuck it, leave me alone... no I am not trying to write a letter!"
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[info]kalimeg wrote:
Jan. 6th, 2007 01:16 am (UTC)
Oh, and an earlier commenter was right -- on your C drive in the AOL folder there should be mail -- lots and lots of mail.
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[info]halloween49 wrote:
Jan. 6th, 2007 01:52 am (UTC)
a gift from the techno god
when something like this happens ..after 5 sec of out right hysterics....( that is all you are allowed ) consider it a gift from the techno gods
Regards
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[info]thebadlady wrote:
Jan. 6th, 2007 02:12 am (UTC)
Randyll Tarly would call the endings of 3,000 emails a hard thing, but fair. ;) I am sorry to hear about your computer issues. Good luck getting your stuff back.
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(Anonymous) wrote:
Jan. 6th, 2007 02:24 am (UTC)
Wordstar was my first wordprocessor. But, unfortunately my mother lost much of her memoirs when the 30 MB harddrive I installed in my trusty Tandy 1000 died.

So far the safest and relatively inexpensive data security is Windows XP on a machine running RAID 1 with a USB external drive for backups.
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[info]hendrikboom wrote:
Jan. 6th, 2007 03:16 pm (UTC)
Linux is cheaper.
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[info]twistedsheets10 wrote:
Jan. 6th, 2007 02:43 am (UTC)
Ouch.

Good luck in restoring the stuff you've lost. The bookmarks might be easier to build up again, but the e-mails might take a while. (but I think given a few days, you'll find 3000 more new emails to replace the old ones)

(I had a bad crash a while ago, and I'm still paranoid when I turn on the computer. I'm afraid that it won't boot again and my data will go bye-bye.)

Wordstar! Brings me back to my high school days. Whenever our computers' windows crashed or malfunctioned, we turn to wordstar!
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[info]dccf_girl wrote:
Jan. 6th, 2007 03:10 am (UTC)
LaTeX anyone?
Heh, I also hate Word! When I was writing my dissertation I used LaTeX and loved it. Talk about versatility. It is like anti-Word. It won't do anything unless you tell it to (unlike Word that automatically capitalizes, "fixes" misspellings, etc.). It's a cool program and a nice change from the MIcrosoft crap.
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(Anonymous) wrote:
Jan. 6th, 2007 05:23 am (UTC)
Dude! U gotta love an empty email box. Wait, lemme go home and write about ten thousand GRRM emails and irritate the crap outta you!
Plus, I have to give you a mental Hi-5 for the Word comment. OMG, Word is inscrutable to me! I Love Wordperfect. I'm old though.
Hope yer New Year was Fantastic
~Regina from North Carolina
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[info]alunatic wrote:
Jan. 6th, 2007 06:13 am (UTC)
I think you've got it when you say "I could try to look at it as a sort of liberation." Three thousand emails? I cannot even imagine the level of stress. I vote that this is a sign. It's just like stumbling on a pack of dire-wolf cubs - the gods have given you a gift. Don't kill it!
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[info]vwampage wrote:
Jan. 6th, 2007 06:21 am (UTC)
there was actually an old mac program called write now, which was a fully functional word processor that was less than 100 Kb. Nowadays though it is incompatible with the current things, so thus it had fallen by the wayside of the times. Kudos on using a purely DOS machine. That always makes things like that easier to deal with.
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