You would think that the last place that you could use "Harmonic Accessing" would be in the service and repair of computer systems. Well, you'd be wrong.

A number of years ago, I was at a customer site working on her computer system.

One of the things her system would do when it was having problems was to corrupt some important data files.

Often, my job was to be a detective, find the damaged file or files and correct them.

The tools to do this weren't 100% effective. Sometimes an error was so subtle, that I'd have to manually review each and every file to find an error.

Since there were over 100 files, some as large as 75 megabytes (75 million characters, the letter "A" being one character). It would take a while to do this.

Late one night I was doing just this. I was tired and bleary-eyed and we needed the month-end accounting to complete so products could ship the next morning.

This particular client was also my "Harmonics" Client, and I had taught her how to access and we often accessed things about her personal life and her business.

She suggested that I use accessing to determine which file was bad.

My ego immediately flared and I said, "You can't fix computers with the Harmonic!"

"Why not?", she countered.

She suggested I print-out a listing of the files and test down the list until my finger "blew" on the bad file(s). At that point, I had nothing to lose. It wouldn't take long. And I had had amazing success with accessing before, so why not try?

I made the print-out and started to test down the page. Eventually I identified two files which my accessing said were bad.

I pulled them up in a text-editor, and to my surprise (you'd think I'd have learned better by this point.. *grin*), the files were bad.

I corrected them, and the month-end ran to completion.

From this point forward, I added Harmonic Accessing to my Computer Repair "Bag of Tricks". It has turned out to be the most effective weapon in my bag.

 

Last modified: 10/08/99

Copyright © 1997, 1998 Albert A. Hartman Jr.

 

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