Season 2 is coming a little earlier than originally planned

There isn't a video for this post (at least not yet), so don't be surprised if I get a little wordy.  Actually, that's pretty much the normal for me when writing -- deploying superfluous words to convey complex creative thoughts.

First season coming to a close

As I write this, we're approaching our vanniversary.  We rented this 2014 Winnebago Travato from it's original owner about this time last year and ended up purchasing it.  And as you have probably already seen on the rest of this blog, done some upgrades to make it work better for us (otherwise known as "mods").

This next month also brings a change in my wife Crystal's occupation, going from where she's tied to home base, to being able to work from the road as I already do.  I do software development, and she's starting an editor position.  This gives us the flexibility of travelling longer trips that we have up to this point, but also puts the burden on me to finish up a few more mods that I've been lagging behind on.

Data loss is a pain, but also an opportunity

This last week I had an incident -- there was a sudden change in a light, where it went from green to yellow right at the perfect time that I would either end up running it or be forced to slam on the breaks much harder than I like to.  Of course, things went sliding.  My laptop computer, which I normally leave on the dinette so I can just swing around and do some work conveniently when I have a chance, took a tumble.  It's actually perfectly fine, as the only moving parts are a fan (it has an SSD hard drive).  However, I had the 1 terabyte external drive (with old style spinning platters) that I use for storing videos for this blog still plugged into it (which was a really bad idea).  It tumbled to the floor also, and is pretty much a total loss.  I attempted to do a recovery process on it, and discovered that most of the allocation table was inaccessible.  Even though I could see the directory of files I wanted, there was no way to recover their actual contents.  Since either one head or platter was evidently damaged, there's enough holes in any large file to make it pretty much unusable.  So from this I have learned and share 3 pieces of advice:

1. Always batten the hatches (put everything away, close and latch everything) before taking off.
2. Always have another backup (don't put all your eggs or files in one basket).
3. When disaster strikes, make lemonade.  Or hot tea, depending on the weather.

So there will be new music tracks for the next batch of videos.  I have the original logo, but I'm thinking of updating it a bit, maybe some simple animation.  And we'll be doing more travelogue episodes along with the regular fixes and mods.  I'm hoping to enlist some family and friends to help with some of the upcoming videos as well.  Should be interesting, I hope you'll stay tuned!