Mentalechoes

So this afternoon, after waking up at the very reasonable hour of 1.30pm, I decided that it was time to do something about backing up my babies. Those being my weblog posts across my numerous weblogs, and my websites, all of which I host at home, on a lovely little server that is something akin to Frankenstein in the PC sense; with a peice taken from this old dead computer, and a peice taken from that old dead computer… you get the idea. Believe it or not, this blog your reading is now over three years old, which is a lot of history really to lose to the inevitable harddrive crash that will happen again, as it has happened to me before. Fortune smiles on us in serendipitus ways, and through another - somewhat technical - blogger I learned of a cheap offsite storage service (called rsync.net for those who are into that sort of thing). Without boring the absolute shit out of you with details, yesterday I signed up for a storage plan, and this afternoon I wrote the backup script that will tuck all my babies into nice compressed beds each and every night and send them all to aunty rsync’s house for safe sleeping. Now if ever the worst should happen, which is definitely the harddisk eating its own head, which can literally happen I’ll have you know, I won’t even shed a tear, much less scream and go on a psychotic rampage with an axe. No, I’ll hack another working part from another computer and transplant it into the server and then replace them babies with a few taps of the fingers. Job done!

All this got me thinking, if only life could be backed up in the same way. Whenever we make mistakes, or we hurt someone, or ourselves; whenever something happens that we just wish hadn’t, wouldn’t it be just great to roll back to the last working version and continue on! Yes I do realise this is just a silly fantasy, but lets just suspend belief and say we could do that for a brief moment, we could roll back our lives to a saved point whenever we screwed up, or life threw us a curved ball we didn’t want to have hit us in the head. You know what the result would be? We’d end up learning nothing, because we only really learn anything when wounds are inflicted, and during the time it takes to heal. Maybe that’s why gawd didn’t give us the backup option in the first place. Because nobody would ever have a life that moved forward, we’d all just be pretty fucked up people from having everything our own way!

Which makes me wonder, is there some deeper meaning in the pain I hadn’t considered yet? This seems to beg for further introspection.

Andy.