Wood and Wire

I just realised it’s been quite a long while since I last wrote about The Pure Drop, despite the fact that it’s been the project keeping me busy for most of the last few months.

We’ve been busy filming interviews and performances around Australia by The John Butler Trio, Zulya Kamalova, Silvia Entcheva, Linsey Pollak and Trouble In The Kitchen. Later this month we’re off to Toronto to film Tanya Tagaq, then Stockholm to film a piece about Garmarna, Yorkshire to meet up with Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, and finally Byron Bay to interview Mandawuy Yunupingu.

In the meantime, the thepuredrop.com.au page has a sneak preview of Reg Mombassa’s fabulous site design.

UPDATE: The site is now live - check it out!.

Something mysterious and bad just happened on my PowerBook.

Basically, it looks like a lot of my application preferences have gone missing. Most applications are acting like I have never opened them before. Daily workhorse applications like BBedit and Transmit are welcoming me as a newbie. My dock looks way too clean, and iTunes and iPhoto don’t seem to know anything about my 30GB of MP3s and photos. Worst of all, Mail can’t find any of the 900 or so emails that were languishing in my InBox.

It’s almost (but not quite) as if the contents of ~/Library/Preferences were deleted.

Has anyone else experienced something like this? I’m trying to think what might have been the culprit, and the only 3 things that spring to mind are:

1. My PowerBook got a nasty bump a few hours earlier
2. I had just finished downloading approx. 9,000 spam emails from an unused email account belonging to one of my clients (don’t ask!)
3. I have the ‘flu, and somehow this made me stupid enough to delete lots of emails and plist files.

Oh well, most of what I lost was backed up, but there is a chance that some recent emails got lost. So, if you’ve emailed me recently and I haven’t replied yet, please try again. It may be that I lost the email you sent me.

Update: I was wrong about iTunes and iPhoto not being able to find media files. The media files were actually gone! So far as I can tell, nothing is missing from my documents folder and all my applications are OK. What could cause such a specific pattern of data loss? It almost feels like a virus. Thankfully I had used a demo copy of Super Duper a few weeks ago to do a complete backup. I’ll be upgrading to a registered version now!