This week, I again scheduled myself to hike Tanner Peak. Yet again, the day before, I had my plans altered. Unlike last week, when I hiked West Fork of Oak Creek, this week’s change in plans was for less salubrious reasons.
As the eagle-eyed reader will have deduced, I have suffered a very unfortunate case of computational fornication.
I forgot what it was I set out to do, but I needed to get into the folder on my external drive which contains the original 1080p (large format) renders of my hiking videos. Plus other videos I occasionally post, such as Phoenix Asshole Drivers. When I looked at my backup/Movies folder, it only contained two videos, not the 200+ I was expecting. I immediately went into the first stage of Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief.
Denial: I figured maybe I was looking in the Movies folder on my Mac, not on the backup drive. I fiddled around for awhile. No, I was looking in the backups. It was empty. 
Anger: I fiddled more, and checked my other Mac, trying to keep a clear head despite being steaming pissed. 
Bargaining: Yes, as I fiddled more, I prayed. It didn’t work.
Depression: Turns out I had lost 283 videos, about 230 of which were ones I had produced, with efforts ranging from a few hours, up to over 100 hours. (As opposed to simply uploading a video from my iPhone.) 
I cycled back through the first four stages as I tried to figure out how to download my original uploads from YouTube, the primary place I’ve uploaded. Turns out one can download the video from YouTube’s Video Manager, but it is in compressed 720p resolution, not whatever original larger format one may have used. (Such as 1080p.) So, a ~500 meg instead downloaded as a ~50 meg file. Worse yet, one can not use Video Manager to download files which include music which YouTube claims is “copyrighted content”. Luckily, I had a plugin which would do that, using Firefox on my old Mac. But the worst was yet to come.
Acceptance: I was fucked. I knew I was fucked. There was nothing I could do about being fucked. Thousands of hours of work basically rubbled. By the time I got around, six hours later, to downloading my 24 Hours of Charlotte karting video, I knew what to expect: The “original” upload I downloaded would be mostly sans music. Despite being the first video I produced, the Charlotte video was also by far the most complicated: 24 minutes long, with over a hundred segments, and seven songs, including Golden Earring’s “Radar Love” and Queen’s “We are the Champions”. It was a great video, and now it was crap. Thanx YouTube, you fuckers. 
So, back to “hiking”: I had a crisis to deal with last night, rather than prepare for my Tanner Peak hike, and had to spend further time today, finishing up downloading the videos, rather than spending four hours (round trip) driving or six hours actually hiking. Since I needed some miles to make the 50 that is my monthly goal, I instead headed out my back door to spend two hours hiking Shaw Butte in the Phoenix Mountains Preserve. The highlight of the hike was noticing some poopy butt wipe. Gotta love urban hiking! 
Oh, and since I didn’t do a hike worth turning into a video, I present to you the third installment of “Phoenix Asshole Drivers”, one of the two videos that were not deleted.
GPS File: Shaw_Butte_Trail_306
Distance: 6.58 mi.
AEG: 1185 ft.
Time: 2h 08m
Phoenix Asshole Drivers
There was a video here, but YouTube deleted my account: I’m now on Vimeo.
