In case you haven’t noticed, there’s no new episode this week.
I’m in the Southern Studio, which means I’m using a different setup from the one I typically use when I record the show. It also means that my resources as a whole are more limited.
While working on the writing portion of the show (Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Hanky Panky, ” for those of you who don’t listen to my episodes all the way to the end but would appreciate the preview), my travel laptop crashed. Well…okay. It’s an older machine and that sort of thing happens now and again. But this was a hard, Blue Screen of Death-level crash, the kind where the laptop has to go back and try to recover stuff.
Now, this actually happened to me a couple of weeks ago, when I was recording the Paul Pena episode, and it’s the reason the show posted late. I’d just finished recording and the crash came while I was saving the audio file. I save them to a personal server located at home, rather than locally on the hard drive. It takes longer but it’s generally safer. However, the save didn’t complete and I lost the file, so I had to record it all over again. And that’s why you have a Stressed Out Claude releasing a show at 3AM instead of somewhere between 11 and midnight.
So yeah…I can’t say I wasn’t warned. And I guess that computer just doesn’t enjoy the whole Carolina Shag scene (never mind it never leaves the indoors). But I wasn’t prepared for this particular crash. This time around the computer said it couldn’t recover the operating system. I’m not as computer-savvy as some, but I’m more savvy than others, and one thing I do know is that if you don’t have a working operating system, what you have instead is a bunch of electronics that don’t know how to be a computer.
Finally the laptop was able to tell me “OK, I can maybe come back, IF you let me restore to factory settings.” Which, of course, means losing a lot of software. Documents I wasn’t worried about, since I was getting an opportunity to copy those over to a flash drive. But that means I’m losing my audio recording and editing software, my Photoshop, and a few other odds and ends that I can’t replace until I get back home.
But I also can’t sit here for the rest of the week staring at a screen. (I mean, I COULD, but the screen has to change now and again.) So, backup documents and reset the machine, is the route I go. Unfortunate, but necessary. And that means that the Southern Studio is shut down for the time being. So, no promises but I’m going to try hard to release two episodes in the next week or so, with the first one (Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Hanky Panky, in case you were only skimming the first paragraph) on the usual Sunday (26th), and a listener-requested song as the next episode. Which one? I’m not telling, but I will tell you that Paul Kondo was the guy making the request (scroll almost all the way down to see the request, if you’d like a hint), and if we lived closer together, Paul and I would totally be drinking buddies. In fact, I may owe him a drink.