Head in the Clouds

Overlong nerdy rant oncoming, fair warning.

I destroyed my computer today. Not physically though I did come close to chucking it at something. Instead an innocuous seeming UNIX command to move a folder turned sour with a misplaced *. What I’d done (unknowingly) was move my entire home directory (everything from my music to my documents to my desktop to my system settings) into some obscure folder I had been working in. Thing is Mac is pretty clever and when it found setting files missing it simply recreated them, hence everything kept working. Chrome lost it’s browser history, that was odd and caused some concern. The OS X title bar went transparent again, something that strikes me as garish and a big indicator something was wrong. And then my laptop ran out of power and crashed. This has been happening a lot recently. Macs are supposed to power themselves off with about 5 minutes of power left. I however use a great little app called Caffeine to toggle screen dimming which has the nasty side effect of not letting the computer sleep. It’s still my fault though, Mac tries to plead with a “Your computer is running on reserve battery power” dialog, but I never listen. So my laptop crashed and after a mad dash for my power cord and a reboot sequence I came to the default splash screen. Normally this would be a sign of relief. Except, I don’t use the default splash screen (it’s too purple). So I log in and I’m greeted by a default desktop. An empty default desktop. Shit. I backed up when? I look around: my files are still in the trash, the downloads folder is still working, something is strange. I open my home folder. Empty except for the defaults, which are themselves pretty empty. Finally I remember the move command. I look it up online and see the terrible power of the asterisk. I find my files, intact luckily, and begin the process of moving them back. While OS X graciously handled the transfer of my files from their proper location moving them back proved difficult. I’m mostly fixed now. By mostly I mean that my essential applications are now working again. Unfortunately this dilemma has had all sorts of side effects which I’m sure will be showing up for the next few weeks. Already Inkscape has an issue where it opens and then immediately crashes.

In looking for the silver lining I did come to realize just how much customization I’ve done on my machine and how awkward it is when it goes back to defaults (I forgot that my text editor was black on white text at one point, crazy). I’d love to do a fresh install but it will take forever to get everything setup again. How I envy those folks who just use computers in whatever state they find them.