Miss Communication
I've been missing my chosen channels of communication. I know my inability to make a decent post over recent days probably hasn't had much affect on the world at large, but nevertheless, I've been suffering withdrawal symptoms (a slight exaggeration, but not entirely unfounded). And even when I got my hardware problems sorted (with a nice, shiny, new LED monitor), there was the need to catch up with correspondence before I could get back to my normal habits, not to mention rewriting my backup scripts so that they blink the keyboard LEDs when the backup is completed.
You may have guessed from the above, that my monitor failed while a backup was underway, and, without any visual information to go by, I (incorrectly) guessed that it had completed (because there was not much hard drive activity), so powered down my PC. Yes, I know what you're thinking: I should have pressed Alt+F4, then Return, to get Windows to close down properly, and avoid the corrupted backup which powering off caused.
However, due to the fact that I use a custom AutoHotKey script which controls a series of utilities to achieve the backup, even shutting down Windows in the normal way is likely to result in an undesirable outcome. On initiating shutdown, Windows would ask, then demand, that the script, and any process started by it, close immediately, cutting short any pending communication between them, leaving the backup in an indeterminate state.
Talking of miscommunication (groan), in my enforced idle time I was thinking about how common it is for people to engage in miscommunication. Sometimes it's deliberate, but sometimes it seems to take on a life of its own, like a cloud which descends upon the participants in a conversation, causing them to flounder about in it, often colliding with miscommunication's sister, misconstrue. Unfortunately, it often results in arguments where none of the participants are listening to what the others are saying, and the miscommunication grows exponentially.
Sometimes it results in farce, and sometimes the farce is funny. I remember watching Brian Rix acting in farces. They were shown on British television back in Nineteen-SomethigOrOther, when everything was black and white. I couldn't find a Brian Rix farce (although I did find this rather odd, very short video), but I'll give this one a go which is an earlier version of the genre, according to the You Tube notes.
