Always appreciate the little things given to you.

From: Michael Bennett (mikemkii_at_nospam.forme.hotmail.com.ok)
Date: 05/21/04 

Date: 21 May 2004 13:54:35 -0700

Well, here's another reason why I love Delphi.

~.pas files.

No, seriously. I'll explain.

It was around 1:30am a.k.a. 11th hour programming, and I'm banging away at the
keyboard coding. Just finished implementing a class for a small DLL that's due
by tommorrow, no biggie. Before I can start testing it, my notebook running XP
Pro has made a decision that my life isn't full of excitement as it should be.
So it proceeds to spice things up:

--------------------------------------
BSOD

SAVRT.SYS
STOP 0x0000008E AT ADDRESS F0484AF8 BASE F046C000 DATESTAMP 3FA3986D
---------------------------------------

15 minutes later and after some random screaming about NAV2003, my notebook was
back up and running.

Unfortunately, when I went back into Delphi 7 and attempted to resume my work,
a dialog box popped up informing me that "one or more lines are too long and
will be truncated"

Huh? So I clicked ok.

Apparently... my entire file was truncated into one... darn... long line of
blocks.

I don't do legos, and I don't type blocks either.

...and I have no source code. Joy. It's 1:50 now. If only I could chuck those
blocks at someone.

Before I decided to seek 'final redemption', I checked my directory and noticed
that the ~.pas file had a timestamp on it that appeared to be around 5-10
minutes before my notebook bombed on me. So I removed the ~ character, replaced
the corrupted .pas file, and I'm back on track. Peace will remain...for now.

Is there a lesson in all of this? Yup, one that I almost learned the hard way.
save and save often!!!!

-J. Michael Bennett Jr.