You might have noticed, if you dropped by my blog a few days ago, that my site was down. I was trying something new, did something silly, and broke my website. Apparently I know just enough to be dangerous to myself.
So I’d broken my site. That’s fine. Since the last time I’d broken it I had been backing up my database. In fact, just before I started poking around in the inner workings of my website through my host I had backed up my database. I would just go in, restore it, and everything would be fine.
I pulled up the instructions, followed them, and the computer tells me there are errors in my saved database file.
Panic!
The instructions were supposed to work. I’m pretty good at following instructions and now I have no idea what to do.
After I calm down and attend a commitment I had that evening (where I tell my sad story to a tech savvy friend who offers to help the following afternoon), I return home to try one more time. In the very least, I need to collect information for my friend so he can help me fix it. And don’t you know it, my desktop computer’s wireless connection is spotty.
Talk about insult to injury. I can’t even try to restore the database.
Frustrated, I move to my mini-laptop. Maybe I can get a better reception in a different room in the apartment.
And then something magical happened. My internet, while still a little sketchy, connected. I tried downloading a bit of my database. No errors. In fact, I download the entire database without any further issue (just some time).
This is where the question of serendipity or something else comes from.
My desktop runs on Windows but my laptop doesn’t. What I didn’t know (and all you tech savvy people are either nodding your head or rolling your eyes at me right now), is that sometimes when you open a file the characters are translated differently. How Windows translated my database information didn’t work with my server.
So my question is: was is purely an accident (another accident) that my internet was spotty, forcing me to switch to a computer with a different operating system, or something else?
What do you think?
