Avarice and Lies

You know one of the things that pisses me off?  Note I said one of the things, since most everything pisses me off these days.  Anyway, it's when companies claim they lost x amount of money in a given year.  Now in the traditional sense of the term, one would have to assume that that dunce Carrol down in accounting misplaced 43 million dollars on her way to the bank, or that the CEO's son took his entire graduating class on a all inclusive 6 week blow and hookers bonanza in Bannock.  But no, in actuality what they really mean is that they didn't meet projected profit.  Projected profit?  The fuck is this shit?

If anything projecting your companies profits is the very definition of counting your chickens before they hatch.  It's the kind of thing that sensible people tell idiots NOT to do. What's even more retarded is the way they calculate projected profits.  For some companies, they at least put some semblance of logic into it, usually by factoring in what projects are expected to release that year, then factoring in popularity of said project, cost of bringing the project to fruition, etc.  However some companies just take the amount that they made the previous year, add 10% on top of that and call it a day. Then when they fail to meet their utterly made up projections they put out an announcement saying they "lost" 43 million dollars.  It's even more ridiculous when a company posts "losses" when the country they reside in is in the middle of a fucking recession.  Yes, Sony, turns out people buy less over priced music from shit artists when they can barely pay the fucking rent. It's almost unfathomable that of all the kinds of people in this world, these are the ones that can successfully operate a business.

Click of Doom

Oh how I wish this were a post about a shitty B movie involving killer dolphins, but alas it is not.

So up until last week my plan had been to buy another large external HDD for backups once boxing day rolled around and the prices dropped lower than the IQ of a West Virginian PE teacher.  Unfortunately I was fucked by fate once again when I heard a loud clicking sound coming from my computer room last Sunday.  Once I determined which external was clicking I didn't even bother to see if the computer still recognized it, I just used the eject drive tool and shut it the fuck down.  This may have been a poor move on my part, because now that my 2TB replacement has arrived and I'm ready to try and transfer the data, the computer won't even recognize the fucking thing.  It starts spinning well enough, but then what I assume is the arm starts clicking, then after several seconds the drive powers itself down.

This is my first ever HDD failure, and it sure does hit you like a kick in the nuts.  In total I lost 500GB of data.  My entire porn collection including my doujinshi, all my pirated games, all my SFW pictures ( a picture for every occasion), all my manga, all my backup game saves, all my Zero Punctuation videos, all my HD game trailers, all of my music, all my cut scene rips, 90% of my passwords and account names I had in various text files, all gone.

I'll spend a little more time ruling out power issues and other possibilities before I write it off for irreparably fucked. Considering how much time I spent gathering this shit from the endless corners of the internet, and considering how many of those corners have since been shut down, or just died, I probably won't even rebuild.  I'll redownload my ZP and music collections, but then that goes without saying.  The rest I suppose I will just make a mental grave for.

Here lies 7 years of my data.  I meticulously gathered you from infinite sources, organized you by category for nigh on a decade, you were the best of the best, but it is time for you to rest.  Goodnight, my faithful 1s and 0s.