@#$%&*!

Word 2007 For Dummies

I wrote the second half of chapter fourteen today for Senta and the Steel Dragon Book 2: The Dark and Forbidding Land… and apparently forgot to SAVE IT!!!  I went back to the file to find it just as it had been before I started typing earlier– with the first half of the chapter and a few second half notes.  Of course if could have been some kind of time warp/dimensional shift, but if that were the case, I wouldn’t remember that I wrote it would I.

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Suspiciously Blocked Site

I was searching for a few education sites on the web this week when I found a site that was blocked. This particular site was “Science Misconceptions in the Classroom”. It showcased, so the description said, errors in the science curriculum that can be found being taught in schools today. I though this might be a valuable resource, but as I say, it was blocked by our web watchdog software. Now, we have many sites blocked for many reasons and usually the reason is plastered across the screen: Porn, Social Networking, Anonymizer Utilities, Chat, Criminal Activities, Gambling, Violence, Hacking, Historical Revision, Illegal Software, Nudity, Malicious Sites, Marketing, Media Sharing, Mobile Phones, Peer to Peer, Personal Pages, Phishing, Ideology, School Cheating, Violence, Weapons, and an outrageously long list of other categories. This site doesn’t list one though. It just says it has specifically been blocked by the school district. Hmmm.

Computer Crashes Suck

I suppose I have to say that I’ve been very lucky. I’ve been using a computer gradebook of one variety or another for fifteen years, and until today I’ve never had a problem. Unfortunately today I did have one. My gradebook file has been corrupted. The data from one class is gone, both in my original file and in the backup. My very wonderful Education Computing Strategist is online with the tech support people to see if we can unscramble the data. Barring that, well, I have the overall grades recorded on paper, just not the grades for individual assignments. I’ll still be able to assign grades. The sad thing is that most of my students don’t care what those grades will be.

Disaster!

I was just working on my new novel over lunch (more on this later), revising bits here and there, and there is a huge chunk, about a chapter and a half that is corrupted. I have backups at home, so hopefully one of them has the missing part. I don’t want to have to rewrite it. It just goes to show you. Back up often. Back up multiple places. Back up with varying names.