So I was chuntering along quite happily, with 3 active sites under development (and one side project for a friend). All was going smoothly and I even managed to take an afternoon for myself and get out into the country a bit.

Of course, this is just exactly when I should be most wary – Murphy, with his famous laws, is always lurking just around any corner I happen to be approaching

In this case, it was Murphy’s Eighth Law;

“If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something. “

Turns out that between working on 4 separate projects and still trying to have some time outside in the Spring-like weather, I had overlooked making a backup of my working files for two whole weeks, and of course my computer totally crashed. So I immediately called on my  friend Gabriel Vrabie at Services Informatiques G.V. Inc. and he came to my rescue.

Turns out my 6-year-old hard drive was beginning to give up the ghost, so he installed a brand new one, almost twice as big as the original, and with a clean new install of Windows. He created a dual boot system so I can access the old drive to get to my data and import what I need to the new drive.

At this point, Murphy’s Second Law –

“Everything takes longer than you think.”

– comes into play. I am in the process of re-installing the programs that I need. This is a great opportunity to install only the ones I need, and eliminate all those that I downloaded to try out and that I ended up not needing or using.

And I am sorting through my data – documents, images, web files, etc.- importing only what I need and archiving a lot of it to an external hard drive, while deleting duplicates and truly useless stuff.

So Spring cleaning in my house is on hold while I spruce up my computer and get ready to get back to work on a faster, more organized machine.