Starting with a crash...

I arrived in Hong Kong on Friday night, and by the time I got into my apartment, it was about 2 AM local time. Completely exhausted from 17 hours of traveling, I immediately went to sleep. Got up the next morning, and plugged in the ol' computer to check email and do a little work. After a couple hours, I stepped away for lunch, leaving the computer on. When I came back, my computer had restarted itself... or, more precisely, it had attempted to restart itself. However, it didn't finish. Instead, there was some weird error message on the screen. It was one that I hadn't seen before, and I've seen quite a few error messages in my day. I attempted a hard reboot a couple of times, but each time I got the error, which appeared to be saying that it was unable to access the hard drive.

I called the IT guy that works for our Hong Kong Line Producer. He told me it sounded like the hard drive had crashed. He's going to look at it for me in a few hours, but says there's only a 50% chance that he'd be able to get it started. He says if not, in all likelyhood, all the data is lost and I'll have to reformat the drive and start over.

Let me tell you, that is going to suck. I had ALL of my files related to the movie on there, including budget, schedule, to do list, etc. Not being able to access them now is quite inconvenient, to say the least. Luckily, not all is lost. I have all of the files on my desktop computer, and my good friend Ben is going to my condo to burn me a DVD, and then ship to me via Fed Ex. (Gotta love Fed Ex for shipping to Hong Kong.) The real pain is going to be reinstalling all the program files -- and that's if I even have all of them.

While I'm can't be 100% sure, I think the problem happened because of a power issue. Hong Kong's power is 220 volts, like the UK. (In the US, we use 110 volts.) When I was here in June, I was able to plug my computer into a wall outlet directly, just using a plug adapter. However, I didn't use a transformer to actually change the voltage. I didn't have any problems then (neither did Ed and Gregg), but perhaps we just got lucky then. My guess is, some kind of power surge happened, and because of the extra voltage, the hard drive got screwed up. But I'm not a tech guy, and certainly not an expert on electricity, so I may be completely wrong.

So, this isn't quite the start to this journey I was hoping for. But, I'm not letting it get me down. If this is the biggest adversity that we'll face on this film, I'll gladly take it.

Other than that, so far so good.

There is a giant store connected to our apartment building, called Jusco. It's like a Target and a grocery store rolled into one, and we don't even have to step foot outside to get there. To top that, just down the street from our building is the largest mall in Hong Kong. So going shopping won't be a problem!

As for getting on a regular sleep schedule... that hasn't been so easy just yet. Last night I went to bed at 8:30 PM, and woke up this morning at 3 AM. It's 8:45 PM right now, and I'm fighting to stay awake. Trying to make it to at least 9:00 PM. If I can push it a half-hour each night, I'll be at an 11:00 PM bedtime soon enough.

That's all for now, kids. I'll try to write again in a day or two. We officially start prep tomorrow, so hopefully I'll have some good production news to report soon.