stupidity

[Edward Glowacki]

Quoted from Ben Pfaff on Tue, Oct 16, 2001 at 11:48:48PM -0700:
> Okay, so my tape drive arrived in the mail from home yesterday.
> I set it up on the computer and scheduled a full backup for 2 am.
> This morning, there was a verification error.  "Damn", I thought,
> "something broke in shipping."  Then tonight I set up a job to
> try again for tonight just in case something different happened.
> As I was swapping tapes I noticed that something looked funny.
> I look again.
> 
> The write-protect tab is set.  I set it so I wouldn't
> accidentally overwrite it.
> 
> *sigh*  I am so stupid sometimes.  So I added a new check to
> /usr/local/bin/make-backup to give a better error message the
> next time.

Yeah, I've seen that problem before.   Today I got some error
messages on the console saying that sendmail couldn't open a device.
I tracked it down, and it turns out it was trying to overwrite my
thesis!  I've been working for months on the paper, entitled
"Development of Normalized Unions of Linear Lines" and I'm almost
done with it.  I reorganized a bit yesterday, and now it's saved
in a directory called /dev/null.  Clever acronym, eh? =)  Good
thing I did a "chmod a-w /dev/null" last night, or all my work
would be gone!

-- 
Edward Glowacki				glowack2@msu.edu
GLLUG Peon  				http://www.gllug.org
Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
                -- Jules de Gaultier