Well, that was fun.
Yesterday morning my e-mail program, The Bat, locked up, giving me the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.
I had downloaded on Thursday the latest upgrade and installed it over my current version. Through Thursday and Friday everything was fine. But not Saturday.
Note to self: Leave well enough alone. If it works, it will probably keep working.
Fortunately, Ritlabs had an earlier version of the program available on the website. I downloaded that in an effort to “roll back” the mistake I’d made in upgrading the software.
No dice. The program still locked up.
This called for radical surgery.
I copied the important files out of the Bat program directories–important message bases, particularly my Sent Items, my taglines file, and my address books–and nuked the program off the hard drive.
Reinstalling the program was a snap. I took putting the pieces back slowly, though. Copy the address books to the proper directories and restart the program. Copy one message folder and restart the program. Finally, everything worked.
I didn’t save everything. Some message folders I hadn’t looked at in months, and they’ve now gone the way of the dodo.
Rebuilding my message templates may take some time. And I need to find my registration codes for the program, but I have a few weeks in which to do that.
Oi!
My friend Todd Kogutt, better known in ‘Net circles as Scavenger, sent me the soundtrack for the Paul McGann Doctor Who telefilm this week. It’s a fantastic score by the Johns Debney and Sponsler and Louis Febre, though in places it’s too lushly romantic to have a Doctor Who feel. Debney managed to do something I long thought impossible–take the Ron Grainer Doctor Who theme and put a symphonic spin on it through horns and percussion. Usually when you think of Doctor Who music it’s of electronic noise, but this CD clocks in at an impressive fifty minutes of scored, orchestrated music for a roughly ninety minute film. Great stuff.