Animated Thoughts: An unexpected blessing from an unexpected source

Well, last night was like Christmas and my birthday all rolled into one.

The label on this disk... it mocks me with
ideas of what treasures it must contain!

For weeks I've been trying to do a sector-by-sector recovery of data from an old Macintosh formatted floppy disk and resigning myself to the fact that I'll probably have to pay to have it professionally done--if there's anything still on that disk at all. It seems that whether I use the tools on my Mac or on my PC, the physical disk simply will not load.

Well, last night, I was poking around some deleted files that I recovered from another disk and not only did I find two lost papers from my 3D Animation I class but the term paper from Stephanie Maxwell's Film History class that I thought was gone for good (and that I thought was locked away on that floppy disk, given what I had written on the label).

Then, when scanning in my handwritten notes from the Film History class, I came across a reference to an additional book that Stephanie recommended we read. I look over to my left and realize that I bought it at a garage sale for $.50 over a decade ago without even remembering what connection it had to her class.

This grad school archival project has been one unexpected blessing after another. At this point, between all the stuff I still have (paper copies of notes, drawings, and physical models), the videos of animations I produced, and the films that I've rebuilt from either my notes or my original material, I think I will have recovered almost 99% of what I lost by the time this project is done.

The only thing I can't recover is my Computer Music project because all of that was on a Zip Drive that I handed in to the professor during class which he accidently lost back in '96 (though I am still holding out hope that I might still have the cassette tape with my three songs on them).