As I browse the web, it annoys me quite a lot to see the ridiculously numerous parts of it that seem to believe that everyone (or at least everyone who matters) is a white, heterosexual, at-least-mildly conservative, middle class or higher, man living in the United States.
Of course, I log in to find over 100 spam comments pending "approval". All of them were on my beware not to infect your visitors post. Fitting, isn't it?
Anyway, I cleaned them up. I did see two genuine comments by actual humans and approved them, but I might have missed some. Sorry if that's the case. I just completed setting Akismet up, so spam should be less of a problem.
As I mentioned yesterday, WordPress hates me and messed up the post I had planned, erasing several links. Lucky for me, the sites are still in my feed reader. So, on with the show.
There are more sites I visit on a regular basis, but I believe these manage to sum up what goes through my mind these days.
As I haven't done any sort of link dump in a lifetime or so, this particular entry will mostly be to sites instead of specific articles.
Great. I had several more, but I must have messed up something while using the HTML editor so that, when I switched to the Visual editor, it fucking erased a bunch of links. I can't be bothered to re-add the other ones now.
I've been reading Lamebook quite a lot lately and it has brought a few questions to my mind.
Well, first of all, this layout will be going soon, I hope. I'm really tired of looking at it. So when you see the site is under maintenance, you'll know the reason. It seems like I should update my version of WordPress too, so that will all be done at the same time.
Anyway, on to the main topic of this post. My brother and sister were discussing online games. More particularly, they talked about an online RPG-like game my brother plays. The game is free, but you can get more features if you buy a membership. The same goes for a game I play, DragonFable. You can register for free and play for free too, but there are items and quests that are only available to paying players.
They both agreed that they didn't see a reason to pay for something which you can get for free. There I completely disagree. Like everyone I do enjoy free things. One of the reasons I use OpenOffice and Firefox is because I don't pay for them.
I would gladly contribute money to some projects such as DragonFable (I really have to get around to buy a DragonAmulet there!). Why? Because there are people behind that project. Sure, they have advertising and probably another job. They're however devoting many hours of their time to this project. What's a small 30 something dollars contribution from me compared to all the time and effort that goes behind the creation of a video game?
I enjoy their game, using their creation, and loading their servers with one more person. I certainly don't see that "investment" as being a waste for me.
Lately, when browsing fanlistings, I often come across a warning from Avast that the website I'm visiting is infected. I wondered what it was, and saw that more than one domain seemed to be infected. I came across this thread over at TFL Boards, explaining what's going on. In brief: if you use Adobe Reader to open PDF files, make sure to upgrade to the latest version. Actually, the the problem was discovered over 2 months ago. You can read more on the security flaw and its patch.
When I formatted my computer, I said I made a back up of everything. Apparently, that was not true. I forgot the single most important folder: the one containing my texts. All lost. This left me no less than devastated.
At first I could do nothing but cry, then I thought about how I had read on programs that can recover deleted files, including after a complete formatting. I tried two of these. The first one, Handy Recovery, is unfortunately a paying program. This means that, unless I pay $49, I can only use it for 30 days and recover 1 file per day. Well, I had more than 30 files to recover, and I would have died of excessive anxiety if I had had to wait 30 days before completing the recovery.
So I looked for another program, and found Recuva. I am going to hump it! It was able to recover many of my files, although some remain lost forever. I'm a bit of an emotional rollercoaster right now. On one hand, not all my files are lost. On the other hand, I did lose some I would have loved to still have.
I have an old backup on a CD here, but, well, it is old. It doesn't have any of the things I have written since moving to Montreal, actually. I always was too lazy to make backups. 
So, I have lost some poems, but those should be elsewhere too, as I published many online. If they aren't online anymore, they could be in database backups (I still have those).
I have lost some fiction. Nothing completed, but still starts I would have loved to keep! I lost one I was particularly attached to, but none of my Big Important Novels. My poor babies
I have lost some Titanic fan fiction! I think I haven't lost any I have written, but I had a nice collection of fan fiction from other people, and it's partially lost.
I have lost some of the work I have made on a video game. I haven't done designs, coding or anything, just concepts and ideas. Well, some of the things are intact, but some of the files were lost.
Finally, a bit of advice if this ever happens to you. First of all, keep in mind that when you delete a file, you aren't really "deleting" it. You are merely telling your OS that the space occupied by this file is free for use, and that there is no longer a file on whatever address it was assigned.
Second, try not to use your computer for anything but the recovery. Shut down IM programs, browsers, text editors, etc. Any program that is running can be creating files (temporary or permanent), and these files could just happen to overwrite your beloved lost ones.
Third, the recovery program will ask you where you want to put the recovered files. It is really important to avoid putting them on the disc where the files were originally. Why? For the same reason as number two: some of the recovered files could overwrite the lost files! You can use a USB storage drive or an external drive.
When a file has been overwritten, the program will still recover it, and save it under its original name. When you open it, however, it will not be the file you thought. My files were all text files (mostly in the .odt and .doc formats), and some of them read as code for software, or characters like #.
That said, I have to catch up on my work. I spent the last 24 hours or so doing just recovery and crying, so I got a bit of catchup to do.
Can you smell this? It is the smell of a brand new computer!
Or maybe not...My computer recently got infected. I scanned with Avast, Malware Bytes, Ad-Aware (twice) and Spybot. While the two latter ones did find files that had to be removed, it was not sufficient to put my computer back on the right track. Browsers kept crashing or consuming enormous amounts of RAM, Google search results were redirected to odd places, AVG disappeared, etc.
As I was already planning to do so anyway, I made a back up of everything and formatted my computer. I just finished re-installing Windows XP and some other stuff.
That's one of the reasons I didn't blog in the past few days. The other one is that I had forgotten my password and reset it. I wrote down my new password on a sheet which has mysteriously disappeared since then. I suspect my mom put it somewhere. I curse at the thought it could be in the recycling bin, as it also had some information from when I installed Portal and Steam. Argh.
And now my cat won't shut up because she saw discs reflecting lights on the ceiling and has been mewing practically non-stop for almost 2 hours. Shut up, bitch.
I admit this post is partly because of a very tiny butthurt due to my own Irish ancestry. But it's mostly because of WTFness. YouTube decided to make their logo green for St Patrick's Day. No biggie. It's posted on their Facebook page. Some people reply with "nice!" and similar comments, but a few people posted with "I don't care" or even "I don't fucking care". If you really don't care, why do you bother telling the world about your carelessness?
"I ABSOLUTELY HAD TO TELL YOU HOW IRRELEVANT THIS IS IN MY LIFE!"
Welcome to Puceronie, personal website of Julie Delisle. Here you can read various texts I have written and learn more about me.
I'm Julie, a 24-year-old person living in Montreal, Canada, with my sister, her partner, their two kids, their cat and my own cat. Read more.
