Before I arrived at the J-School and set up the QuickTime Streaming Server, our multimedia classes used a university streaming service called bmrc to post Real Video content. Unbeknownst to me, bmrc lost funding a while ago and they pulled the plug on their servers, breaking tons of legacy content on our site (and others). Nice. No warning, not even a how-do-you-do, just blam, you’re dead.
After a chain of emails to various departments, finally tracked down someone who knew where the original servers were located — in a walk-in closet in his boss’ office. Cool guy. I gave him a list of .rm files and he kindly yanked the server out of storage, then passed me a gigabyte of legacy video content. Spent most of the day updating .ram files to point to the new location on our own server, where they all should have been to begin with.
Every summer at the J-School is like this – go into it with my sights set on a fistful of big-eyed projects I want to complete, and it slips away with a series of stupid emergencies and fiddly things. Death by a thousand papercuts. Sigh.