I took a cold shower and went for a run.
I've been whining way too much lately.
What's been clearly established is that recovery of the projects that were in the C drive folder is completely impossible.
The good news is that half the projects on the other hard disk survived.
And half of the knowledge I had documented is gone. At least some of the topics I had set aside to write about on the blog are still there. That alone is something to be grateful for.
It's understandable to whine about it. After crying a bit I feel okay, and when I think about it, I've been through worse.
If losing what I had written means I can no longer write it again, then it was never really my knowledge to begin with — it was just sitting there collecting dust, knowledge that would have been useless anyway.
The projects I had been sitting on for years without making progress were things I couldn't let go of only because of sunk cost.
Just because my AI setup is gone doesn't mean I can't write code, and if I set it up again I'll probably find an even better way to do it.
Language and environment settings, IDE configurations — all of that can just be redone from scratch with a fresh mindset.
None of it was really mine to begin with. I just thought it was.
I've been whining too much this past month. When your bank account runs dry you naturally feel down, but having everything smashed to pieces like this actually feels liberating — like a fresh start.
It's not like all of the notes and records from my studying are gone either. Some of them remain.
Most of what was lost includes contracts for proving my work history, part of the shopping mall website I manage (about a month's worth), book summaries I had written while studying, and some projects.
It genuinely hurts, and the career records and contracts hurt the most, but everything else can be redone.
Those outputs aren't who I am; I, still alive, am the result of everything that produced them, so clinging to what's lost is pointless when there's no going back.
(These are records from just before the last boot. After that boot, the hard disk completely died.)
Losing a mere 800GB or so doesn't mean my life is ruined.
That said, I really want to let NI LabVIEW have it with some choice words: "What kind of insane program corrupts the Boot loader just because you ran the Uninstaller? Don't sell something like this for money. FUCK YOU. NI"
I'll just do it all over again. I've already called a repair shop to come tomorrow for the computer. I'll get started from tomorrow. I can handle the rest of the work on my laptop.
It stings, but if I try again it'll work out somehow. I've survived harder times than this.