I haven’t felt as tired as I felt this morning since the day after I took the first actuarial exam. My entire body felt extremely heavy, and I didn’t really have the concentration necessary to drive. Needless to say, work was a lot of fun.

Some good did come of dragging myself into the office, however. Bill, who maintains the office network, came in at the end of the day and was puttering around—and part of that puttering was installing software on my machine. We chatted while the software installed, and eventually our conversation came around to hard drive crashes. Bill then mentioned that most modern systems allow for mirroring of drives, which lit a light bulb in my head.

You see, neither my sister’s nor my computer are currently backed up. I’ve had computers long enough to know that hard drives fail, and they usually fail when you least want them to—indeed, a year or so ago Marin lost a good portion of her files from one such failure.

The only reason that she didn’t lose all her files was that I had a somewhat-recent backup.

Anyway, this lack of backup has been gnawing at me over the last couple days (yes, I’m the sort to worry about backing up)*, and the idea of mirrored drives was a lightning bolt to my brain. Indeed, Mac OS X does support RAID 1 (the technical term for mirrored drives); furthermore, there’s a read-speed boost from such a RAID, because both hard drives can be sent looking for different information at the same time. Marin’s computer already has a second drive in it, so I’m going to see if it’ll really work. (The biggest downside is that drive mirroring won’t protect you from accidental file deletion or viruses… but those have never caused me trouble in the past, and the most important files can also be backed up to CD…)

[*Sadly enough, I also learned that our work servers haven’t been backed up for a number of days now—thanks to a dead tape drive. That’s the kind of scenario that would give me nightmares, if I had any responsibility.]

…

Upon returning home, I found a letter from the Society of Actuaries waiting for me. Others must not have done all that well on the first exam, because my grade was a 10. [Obscure grading rules: range is from 0–10, where 6–10 are passing grades. Each increment/decrement from 6 is supposed to indicate a 10% deviation from the minimum passing score, or somesuch; 0 and 10 do not mean “all wrong” and “all correct,” but rather “pretty bad” and “pretty good.”] That’s kind of sad, in my eyes, because I know I didn’t get anywhere close to 100% on that test.

This evening we visited Grandma and said ‘hi’ to my aunt, who’s visiting for the month. We let her borrow a car every time she visits, so Marin and I now get to both battle over who gets the remaining car and complain over the other’s bizarre musical tastes.

…okay, so maybe I’m the only one with poor musical taste.