erase and rewind

what is about the worst thing in the world that could happen to an obsessive compulsive pack rat computer geek? hard drive crash? probably. i won't call her my sweetheart, because we were only together for less than a year. more like a one night stand and getting a regrettable disease. funny how this "new" drive crashed and my old reliable P3 server, which has been on 24/7 for almost 2 years serving this and that has no problems what so ever. i guess sometimes you just get a bad seed. but before yelling at the warranty people, i had to try to salvage my priceless data (which hadn't been backed up since december) so began late nights performing delicate surgery. ran out instantly and bought a new 250 gig drive, loaded windows, just enough to make it usable. then tried to read from the bad drive as a slave (since it wouldn't boot). seems like i got most data from 2 partitions (although some seems quite corrupted), although i couldn't read anything from the old c: partition. *sigh*, that's where my email is! windows could see the partition, but couldn't recognize the format. drat. so i got some advice to boot into linux and try to salvage. there is a cool linux distribution called Knoppix which you burn to 1 bootable CD, then without needing a hard drive, you can boot it up, instantly configures itself and is a fully functional linux operating system complete with a beautiful window manager, internet connectivity, and all the usual applications. i was quite impressed, insert disc and it just runs in ram. no configuration needed at all. however, even using this, i was unable to mount the bad partition giving bad data block errors in linux. crap. as a last resort i heard of a local company that does hard drive recovery. they said they just recover whole drives, not just a partition, and even then no guarantees. since it was a 200 gig drive, they said it would cost between $500 and $1900 depending on data and how difficult it was. well, you may be thinking, sure Josh it's not like you have a girlfriend to spend your money on... well true, but i'm not *that* crazy and obsessive over a hard drive. i said no thanks. so now i sit backing up what i did recover to dvdrw, will reformat my new drive, and return the bad one hopefully. so if you've sent any important email to me since december, you may want to resend :D and a good lesson to backup your data. be like a friend of mine who keeps all important data on 1 cd, and reformats his computer every few months. if you are a pack rat like me, this could be hard, but going through this made me realize there is more to life than crap on a hard drive. i think so anyway???



However, the week ended a little better. Last night I saw The Cardigans at the House of Blues in Downtown Disney. It was the first time seeing my favourite band from Sweden (only band from Sweden?) and highly recommend their new album that finally got released in the US. Amazing to see Nina sing live not more than five feet away, *swoon*. And then the stars must have been aligned right today, as during a staff volleyball game I somehow got myself involved in, I actually had a killer game. Being the awkward tall guy, things didn't start well after joining, but after weeks of practice things are coming together. Good thing, because one of the stars of the team, another tall spiker guy was out sick. Luckily I had some good plays, and one to end the game with a rather strong spike that almost took the head off some very cute girl on the opposing team ;P. The whole team was good today and we easily won our 3rd straight game. Although our competition will get stronger later on in the playoffs, it is good practice to defeat these teams in straight sets. And a good way to let off some steam of a tough week :D