quizzical.net

Do not provide any service to any computer system (PC, website, PDA, whatever) that does not have a current backup. It doesn’t matter how simple or safe the operation is; anything in a computer can go wrong at any time, by pure chance, and if you happen to be working on the computer at the time, YOU will be blamed. Seriously, it does not matter how much they beg or threaten, or what your relationship with the person is; Murphy’s law doesn’t care. Oh, and undelete programs are snake oil. At best, they do nothing. At worst, they will overwrite any non-corrupt data with “recovered data” i.e., random bit strings.

That being said, encourage others to back up their data weekly, so that they may benefit from your technical aptitude when they are in need of it. Data loss can strike at any time, even when a system is off-line and unplugged and packed in Styrofoam and sealed in a vault and…

Also, when you work on a document, e-mail it to yourself. That way, when you have a night of flowing, creative stupidity, you can throw it away the next day and have something reasonable to work with.

Anyone want to guess how I spent my evening?

Being interesting, in writing for instance, is a skill that must be practiced like any other, primarily by spending a lot of time being uninteresting while figuring out what appeals to people. I know this, and have repeated it to myself many times since I figured it out about a year ago (yeah, I’m a late bloomer), and yet I refuse to post to my blog (excepting today) unless I think that what I post will somehow change the world. Periodical writing can indeed change the world, but such writing tends to come from extensively-practiced professionals, and even then the phenomenon is quite rare. I have even set goals for myself in the past to write to quizzical.net every day; but when the time comes to do it, I note that I don’t have anything interesting to say and I move on to other things.

The problem with such thinking, of course, is that I will never learn to harvest the interesting thoughts that come to me from time to time if I do not first learn to harvest thoughts in general. And surely, even with my lack of experience in writing, I can still be more interesting than some random person’s cat blog.

So if you’re reading this, it’s most likely because quizzical.net has become wildly popular as a result of my daily writing practice and you’ve decided to go digging through the archives. As you examine the shoddy quality of this article, remember: everyone starts modestly.