Okay, the real reason for my craptabulous mood of late. Are you ready?
Can you handle the truth? Read on.
Basically, it boils down to one thing: I’m no longer able to stick my finger in the nearest creative outlet and get a satisfying shock out of it. Actually, that sounds a bit more risque than it’s supposed to, so let me just try that again.
Earlier this year, the Avid nearly fried in its own fat. It’s spent long periods of time “in the shop”, a friend of mine donated a new power supply, and then… it turns out the hard drive was toast too, perhaps as a side-effect of the original problem.
Let’s not kid around: not every Avid project I launched into was a money-maker. Some of them are pretty utilitarian (i.e. PDF game videos for the site), and some of them are goofy stuff that’s intensely fun to work on, but I could never charge for. The ratio of stuff I do for fun vs. stuff I do that I can make a buck from is probably 5 to 1.
Problem is: it’s been driving me crazy to just flat out not be able to do it, period. Some people knit, some people paint, some people do other stuff… this is just what I do. I put stuff together in this way. It’s just something I know how to do, and have always known how to do. I didn’t go to school for it. It’s just something that was there the first time I hooked up two old VHS VCRs when I was a kid. The moment I figured that out, it was just something I knew how to do, almost instinctively. Most of my adult life has been spent doing this.
And – not to sound ungrateful to the friends who have inspected/fixed/etc. this machine in their spare time – it’s just taken most of this year to fix this thing, fix that thing, and now to arrive at the verdict “Your hard drive is fried.” I can’t complain too loudly when all of this work has been done for free (and I understand that if these same folks have a chance to do something to make a buck first, that gets priority)… it’s just taken a long time. The outboard drives are not fried – they contain the actual media. What’s been lost on the internal hard drive is the road map of how to put all that together. (Thank God I kept dumping these little work-in-progress Flash movies off… now all I need to do is recreate them frame by frame!) And let’s not talk about the tedium of reinstalling an entire OS (and an old one at that), reinstalling all the drivers and software… you name it. My Avid’s been down most of this year. Considering some of the other stuff that’s gone on this year, that also means that one of my favorite “escape hatches” from real life, work, and daddy duty has been missing.
So… yeah. I’ve been cranky. At any rate, it’s good to know what’s up. A replacement hard drive is on the way, I’ve got all the installer disks, and I’m ready to get that grunt work out of the way and get back to doing what I do best. What I haven’t been able to do for so much of this year. I mean, it’s not like I don’t write and do a bunch of other stuff, but this is kind of like my backbone – it’s always there in the background, I practically do it to relax. Not having that creative outlet has been like having one hand tied behind my back all year. With barbed wire.
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