All My Ridiculously Huge Projects

I've been extremely busy doing nothing much.

The only real news I have recently is that after almost TWO YEARS, I finally have recovered my data drive. I destroyed it in late January or early February of 2005 by deleting the partition that contained all of my data. And I do mean ALL. I had been actively working to have only installed programs on the C drive, while all program settings and such were on the D (data) drive. But then, during a Windows reinstall (which ought to be done by most people at least once a year on general principle), I goofed and removed the data partition. I realized instantly what I had done, so I stopped, removed the drive, and didn't do anything with it until I found a way to recover it. (Continuing to use it makes the data move from "likely to be recovereable" gradually through stages to "impossible to recover.")

So, last week after jumping through a lot of hoops (most of which were, in hindsight, completely unnecessary), I finally got all my data back, and I've been busy combing through the files, figuring out what I had, what I have, and what I'm still missing. Reorganizing the files I've made since the loss with the earlier files so that everything's easier to find. It's a big job, but I seem to thrive on big jobs my husband considers useless.

I've also been working on my music/audio book collection, making everything into MP3s. Most audio books already have fairly short files (two to five minutes long, on average), so that if you have to stop listening and start again at the beginning of a file, you don't repeat too much (or if you choose to listen to the end of a file, that's not too long a commitment). But a few of mine have chapter long files and the ones that came from cassettes are 30 to 45 minutes in a file, which is ridiculous. So, I'm using a piece of software I found for FREE (gotta love freeware) called WavePad to break them into two minute chunks within each chapter (I put new chapters in a new chunk by default).

Of course, I've got tons of data entry I'd like to be doing (cross-stitch patterns, digitizing books, recipe input), but I've been so busy with everything else that it just hasn't been happenning lately. If I were to get inspired, be able to remove all my distractions, and work on the data entry I'd like to complete non-stop until it's done, it would probably still take many years. So, I'm not too pressed if it doesn't get done, but I do like to be making some progress.