Had a bit of excitement today…for reasons I haven’t tracked down yet, my computer decided to become unstable and die badly. While I was recovering from it, I launched Firefox to look some things up, and realized my bookmarks were gone. Completely gone. Possibly ten years’ worth of bookmarks, some imported from my old Macintosh SE/30, gone.

After a few moments of screaming “OHMYGODWHATAMIGOINGTODO?????” inside my head, I took a few deep, cleansing breaths and forced my heart rate to something under 160 beats per minute, and started to think. This is something I urge you to do in any emergency, since running around crashing into things isn’t going to do anyone any good at all. I needed to research the issue on the Net, but I sure as blazes couldn’t use Firefox, since it was clearly fubar’d, so I immediately shut it down and launched…gulp…Internet Explorer. Yes, I realized I was taking my computer into my hands (we all know how secure IE is), but since I wasn’t going to be going many places, I thought it would be ok. A trip to scroogle.org (a proxy for Google that prevents Google from tracking your every search - just because one has nothing to hide doesn’t mean one wants a third party to know everything), a few well-written searches (the first was, no kidding, “Firefox ate my bookmarks” which turned up a surprisingly large number of hits!), and I realized Firefox routinely backs-up bookmarks, one/day for a week. A quick trip to the default profile directory, a copy/paste of this morning’s bookmark file backup, and everything was returned, safe and sound.

There’s no big revelation here, just a reminder that panic rarely fixes anything. If it isn’t life-or-death, you can afford a few self-indulgent moments of screaming madly inside your head, but then the best thing you can do is force yourself to calm down and know there’s a solution to whatever problem you face if you only gather the presence of mind to find it.

Still, I won’t be needing any caffeine to keep me awake this afternoon…