the ramble dump

I'll start this entry with a bit of a mystery. Even though I've checked my AOL email preferences over and over again to try and make sure that it doesn't happen, every once in a while, the emails that are automatically 'saved on my PC' disappear. At first I thought it might be something AOL did every few weeks for some reason or another, but checking the main family account, this hasn't happened there.

As a result, I've started sending any emails I don't want disappearing to a Gmail account. I thought I'd done this with Agaffa Chapters 6 and 7, but it turns out I'd only done it with the latter. I asked Olli if he could sent me Chapter 6 yet again, but apparently he doesn't have it anymore either.

Shit.

I started a frantic search through every single folder in my account hoping to find it, which gave me nothing, and then I tried looking for anything of the chapter in my entire harddrive. All I got from that was a paragraph on Emporer Pseudonym's exercise machine. It looked like we were going to have to write most of the chapter again.

Thinking it would just be in vain, I then started to look through the computer's AOL files, looking for some kind of back-up. I found the files that manage emails. The relevant one didn't appear to have a filetype, so I tried opening it with Notepad. It was mostly just unreadable code, possibly encrypted or in a language only AOL could read, or probably just random characters because you're not really supposed to try and open it as a text document, but occasionally there were dates, email addresses and subject titles visible. I realised that some of these were emails that had disappeared from the 'saved on my PC' folder. Unfortunately, most of them didn't display the contents in anything other than the unintelligable code, but I looked for any Agaffa-related emails anyway.

To my surprise, I found parts of previous chapters of Agaffa, from when we'd done email relays (write a bit, send it, other person writes a bit, sends it back, etc) in readable text, even if it was often filled with HTML tags. I don't know why only these few emails weren't unreadable... there were also some early drafts of Starcustard and some other emails that were prepared in Word, so that might be why. It took me a while to scroll down through the whole text looking for Chapter 6, with the previous chapters slowly building up to completion as I progressed, but eventually, luckily, I found it... or at least, most of it. It has all the emails for Chapter 6 and therefore all of that chapter, but the final few emails' contents are just code, which I have no idea how to convert into English.

I've been trying various things all day... trying to get it so I can view the email in the AOL email window, searching for a decoder on Google, and even trying out some frequency analysis (replacing the most common character with the most commonly used letter in the English language and working my way down to the least common from there, stupidly hoping that whatever encryption there is will be that simple), but that got boring after about ten minutes. It's all been a waste of time.

So, like I said, we have most of the chapter, which is lucky. We've lost roughly the last third of it, possibly less. Now I'm just trying to remember everything I can about it...

The moral of this story is: don't use AOL.

I think it's odd that I've been putting more effort into avoiding having to rewrite it than we'll now have to do actually rewriting it. Oh well.

Labels: agaffa, starcustard, webtechnical

# posted by Chris @ 7:30 PM