I have never sat down and watched The Horse Whisperer but I understand that the titular hero is a man with an uncanny ability to bring errant horses back into order. I think there is a touch of that type of skill in my line of work when it comes to fixing bugs in software and other kinds of computer troubleshooting.

I have just made one of my colleagues very happy and relieved by finding a chunk of data she thought she had lost. In fact there was little more to it than calmly working through a number of possible files (each contained in copies of TrueCrypt containers; very secure but adding an extra barrier to compare each file version) until I found the right one. The knack of finding solutions is partly experience and knowledge but much more about the patience to methodically look through the options.

Now, back to the pixel-face and time to apply the same approach to debugging some software I am working on.