Accidentally Preventing Skynet

Rob here. If you’ve listened to even a single episode of our show, you know that I enjoy the occasional fine adult beverage. Sometimes, however, said beverages make me infantile, in the sense that I deny that I should go to bed, even as I am nodding off while watching Guardians of The Galaxy at midnight. However, since I am not actually an infant, I have the ability to try to stave off bedtime by brewing up a pot of coffee. And since I enjoy adult beverages, I also have the ability to fortify said coffee with a heavy pour of Tennessee whiskey.

If you’ve ever enjoyed a fine adult beverage, you know that after enough of them, particularly when switching from beer to whiskey, they can have an adverse effect on your fine motor control. Sometimes this leads to dropping things. Things like coffee cups. And sometimes, those cups will spill in unfortunate ways. Ways like, I don’t know… directly into the power supply fan port of the computer you use to edit your podcast. You know, the machine that contains all the regular sound elements and the configured audio editor you need to actually complete an episode.

The machine died painlessly, but instantly, meaning I’ve had to replace it. This means ordering parts – friends don’t let friends buy computers at big box stores – and waiting for them to arrive. The main machine is here, but a couple of key components aren’t coming until this afternoon.

Even worse, it means reconstructing your data. Luckily, a certain amount was backed up to the cloud. Unluckily, all of that data was encrypted, meaning recovering the keys from an old cell phone. Which worked, and worked far more reliably than trying to get a seven-year-old internal hard drive (the drives, luckily, were on the other side of the machine, and mounted toward the top of the case) to connect to a shiny new machine via a USB connection. Oh, it can be done, but it requires command line tools and time. Like, six to eight hours per drive. Times three drives.

Long story short: as much data as possible is busily being recovered and copied to the new machine, and the remaining parts will be attached and running in the next couple of days. So there WILL be a new episode next week. Probably not about Ghost in the Shell, as that movie died to fast I think it’s on SyFy in the next few days, but barring unforeseen catastrophe, there WILL BE AN EPISODE.

So thanks to you listeners who reached out via email and Facebook to make sure we’re alive. We’re fine. I’m horribly embarrassed and several hundred bucks poorer, but fine nonetheless.