I'm freaking out right now...I shouldn't because it's completely unproductive but I decided to make my frustration productive by writing a blog about what I have done to cause myself grief.
So, I'm currently working on analyzing data for the first phase of my research - it was already a super slow process because of the volume of data we got (course assignments, mailing lists and projects that I had to analyze). Such that I could easily work from home on my own machine I installed a VM with Windows - I got Windows 8 because it's free through the school and I wanted to see how awesome it was - and installed the bare essentials. When I say bare essentials I mean Eclipse, Chrome and Notepad++ (well I guess I should have said my bare essentials..). Once I got them installed, I decided to try analyzing my final set of projects on my VM - horrible idea. It's been working fine and then today, I get a wonderful error message concerning the memory being used - there isn't enough?! So, as I sit now I am unable to start my VM; let me tell you why this is bad...
1) I had already downloaded all 20 projects - and by downloaded I mean looked up which students could participate, went through a whole process to randomly select 20, went onto the course webpage to download all 20, and create anonymized projects in Eclipse for each.
2) I had already begun extracting data and putting together counts of everything I was finding (that file was also on my VM).
My only saving grace is that I put the detailed analysis on my Google Drive (thank you GDrive!) so I still have that - this gives me the few projects I did analyze. The issue here is that I still have to either figure out how to get my VM back up and running to get the projects and count file off my VM orrrr I will be re-downloading all the projects...which leads me to wonder whether I need to start over with a new bunch or if it's okay to keep the ones I've done and just randomly select the rest. I want to be optimistic and say I'll be able to get my VM running but I've been trying for a hot minute now with ZERO luck...so it doesn't seem promising.
So now, I am sitting here debating on whether I want to use the next few hours of productivity I think I have left in me tonight to figure out how to get this VM back up or re-downloading all these projects. It's probably to do what I know I can do rather than what I want to happen. And what makes it worse is I'm beating myself up about the fact that I put everything on my VM instead of putting it at least in a shared folder! It's one of those hard lessons learned - fortunately it's not a huge setback (although it really does suck)! Putting it up here definitely helps though - especially if I can help prevent someone else from making the same mistake on even more data!
So word to the wise, if you use a VM, make sure anything important is put into a shared folder. Don't make the same mistake I did!
Now, off I go to probably re-download and organize these projects...wish me luck!
Until next time (which will hopefully be sooner than later)...
