THOMnottom

My server hard drives are acting up again. Serves me right (pun not-so-intended) for trusting drives that had previously shown signs of failure. So it’s time to look for deals on replacements as they are certainly out of warranty. CompUSA has a great price on a 250GB SATA drive going on (only 60 bucks after rebate for those interested), which would be a start except for one problem – no SATA on the server.

Not to be stopped, I figured for that money it would be worth it to increase the storage on my desktop, switch both drives to SATA, and kill some of my dependency for excess space on the server. Sounds like a plan. Yesterday I picked up the drive and last night I prepped everything. Since it was going to take awhile to copy the 100+ gigs of data intended for this drive, I let it run overnight. This morning I happily noted that everything was complete and figured I would prep the other SATA drive to take over the primary drive’s duties. By now you should have figured out that this is an overly geeky entry and will probably have zoned out before I got to the mildly humorous part. Trust me, I’m trying to get there.

There was a minor annoyace with the existing SATA drive. Because it was originally in a Dell system it had this stupid, inaccessible config partition that Windows refused to delete for me. So I figured I would try out the controller BIOS and look for some low-level utilities. Unfortunately, all it had was the ability to setup a RAID on the drives. Without going through the details, I futzed around with the setup for while before deciding not to risk the data loss and just cancelled out of everything. In my mind that meant, “Don’t make any of the changes I was thinking about.” In my computer’s mind that meant, “Don’t make anymore changes besides the ones you were thinking about.”

I booted up the computer and found only one partition. Turns out, that just by beginning the procedure to create a RAID, the BIOS deletes all existing partitions on the drives. Before you hit create, or apply, or any such button POOF! It’s all gone. Oh joy. I know you can recover lost partitions, but I wasn’t sure how much the software would cost (do I essentially want to pay the rebate over to recover from a stupid BIOS programmer’s doing?!?!) or how reliable it would be on SATA drives. I tried a couple demos that claimed they could do the job for $70 – which was just way too much for the data I wanted to get back. Then I thought of actually searching for “open source” partition recovery software. Thank you TestDisk! Thank you so much.

Sure, it’s not a pretty program. But it did what it’s supposed to do. I restored the partition table and, after a quick reboot, all of my video editing files were back online. Three cheers for Open Source Software!

As a side note, I always wanted to give a little shout out to Accurate Data Recovery – who have done some excellent hard drive recoveries for me at work – and Acronis – whose software does way better disk and partition work than Norton.

Okay, enough geekery…

Many years ago, a couple of my sisters bought me a whip while traveling out West. It’s odd enough that siblings would purchase a whip for me, but I am now left with the position of finding a location for said whip. For relatively innocuous reasons it has ended up in a storage area in our house that is being called “The Childhood Memories Closet.” I can only imagine the bizarre set of circumstances soon to transpire that will end up with Child Services paying my rather perplexed parents a visit.

Just an update on various subjects left hanging:

• The house is coming along just fine, thank you very much. I know that’s the number one question that people seem to have. And the follow-up is usually about pictures. I’ve been taking a lot, and will be posting more this weekend to let people see the progress. It’s amazing how far a pair of drapes really can go.
• I went rollerskating for a friend’s birthday a couple weeks ago – as usual, pictures are long overdue. And trust me, the fact that they are embarassing to me is not the hold up. I AM VERY LAZY!
• This site desperatly needs a re-design. Once again: I AM VERY LAZY!
• Since I haven’t been posting these pictures, many of you may not realize how shaggy I’ve become. Over the holidays and beyond, I let my beard and hair grow out and now look like a nerdy version of Jeremiah Johnson. This won’t last long past the beginning of Spring, and will certainly be taken care of before the wedding. But I’m still enjoying the “darker” version of me to the “evil” version of me.
• I’ve rejoined Netflix. I’m sticking to the one movie at a time schedule right now. So far that means I’ve only watched The Constant Gardener – which was excellent – as I try to get back into the swing of things. I figure even one movie a week will put me ahead.
• My copy of HDAdvance arrived yesterday. And as I copy all of my games up to my PS2, the console experience will never be the same again.
• In case there was any doubt as to how much I love my job, I just spent the last two hours drinking Guinness and swapping tales of ethnic pride in the cafeteria. And that was some awesome soda bread.

Real updates are bound to crop up at any moment – but they’re bound to be just as pointless.

Spamusement is always great for a laugh, but for some reason the latest guest comic has had me chuckling all day.

I really want to head down to SXSW someday – but that’s not likely anytime soon with the way my financial and personal life are going. In the meantime, I’m very happy to get to listen to Heather Armstrong (Dooce) and Jason Kottke‘s keynote speech while I work. It’s interesting enough that I might actually get into this whole podcasting phenomenon.

I’ve mentioned her before, but I do have to stress how awesome Dooce is – if you don’t believe me, just read this entry (which drove both Lisa and I to tears – the laughing kind). No, I’m not one of those fanatical freaks that drools over every word she writes and praises her for the simplest of feats (although I must admit to being way to geekily excited when I realized her blogiversary is only a day before mine – even if she’s been writing for two more years than me), but she still regularly makes me laugh and smile.

Oh well, didn’t get tickets for the Jersey show today. Actually, I could have had tickets for the 6/1 show, but I really just wanted to go 6/3. So I tossed them back in the mix for other people. I figured that would be better than plunking down another 100+ bucks on a night I wasn’t too sure about. I kicked myself right afterward, but considering I’m home early today so that Lisa and I can head down to Philly to see Billy Joel, I think I can skip a show here and there.

Of course, I’m all for trying to get tickets with other people (hint, hint Sara) for the 6/3 show through TicketBastard. Otherwise, I’m sure I’ll be trying to get ones for the next leg of the tour.

Yeehaw, Pearl Jam is going on tour again. In case you missed the fact that I love Pearl Jam – I LOVE PEARL JAM. Fortunately I re-joined the Ten Club (their official fan club) a while back, which has now helped me get tickets to yet another concert. Unfortunately, this process is not as easy as it sounds.

Last summer when I got tickets, the server continually crashed under the load, and I spent close to an hour just trying to log onto my account just for a shot at buying tickets. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but people couldn’t even tell if they had sold out or what. This time around, the server didn’t seem to crash, but it still kept screwing up the process. I logged on just before 1 PM to make sure I was ready. As soon as the tickets went on sale, I saw them available and added a pair to my cart. No need to pause for additional merchandise, I immediately pushed the checkout button. Much to my amazement, everything was going smoothly. So far…

Confirm Shipping Address. OK. Confirm Billing Address. OK. Login. WHAAAHHH?!?! I got kicked out just before submitting my credit card. Five minutes later I was finally able to log back in only to find my cart was empty. Sure enough, tickets were no longer listed as available. This calls for writing an extremely acerbic post on a forum that will accomplish nothing! Instead, I stewed for a little bit, and read about other people’s woes with the system. Then somebody pointed out that tickets would keep getting pumped back into the system as incomplete orders fell through and credit cards did not clear. With some renewed hope, I logged back in and started refreshing the ticket page. After several refreshes, the BUY TICKETS button reappeared. I was determined not to screw this up. So no refreshes or second clicks – I just pressed each SUBMIT button as it appeared and let the server take 5 minutes per page. With enough patience, I came out the other side with a complete order.

On Saturday, May 27th, I (and a lucky as-yet-to-be-determined guest) will be rocking out to one of the greatest live bands ever. I’m hoping to add a second date today when the East Rutherford tickets go onsale. That would bring my grand total to 10 Pearl Jam shows. And I have no desire to stop. My goal is to hit at least 2 shows everytime they tour. It’s well worth it.

For those wondering about just how good these guys are after all these year, go download their new single “Worldwide Suicide” from their Myspace page (weird, huh?) for FREE! The new album will hit shelves on May 2nd. Once again, YEEHAW!

The idea behind packing for a move is that you get rid of all the crap you don’t want/need anymore and only take the good stuff. A purging, if you will. On that front, our move was a complete and utter failure. We took just about everything. That means the onus has now been shifted to the unpacking portion of the move. Once again, oh joy.

But it does mean that more stuff is being tossed with ease. There’s far less well-we-might-need-it-in-the-future talk, because – to use a corny expression – the future is now. There’s no need to save something in case we could use it in our house, because we’ve got the stinkin’ house, so if we can use it we will. And if we’re just holding onto it for sentimental reasons, we’ve got plenty of boxes and closets to fill.

One site has really helped out with the whole house cleaning thing, though. And that is Freecycle. Sandy had introduced me to it, and I was intrigued by the idea of picking up some things that weren’t important enough to bother with an exchange of money for. Instead, it’s turned out to be an incredible resource for getting rid of all the things I never threw out because I thought it would be wasteful. Before we moved I was able to quickly get rid of an old 17″ Mag monitor (some of you may remember that one since it dates back to my college years), an old 9″ monitor, and an old air conditioner (still working, but we got a new one for cheap). Now I’ve already been able to get rid of most of the boxes and packing material from the move as well as the extra firm mattress the previous owner had left for us. Sure, I’ve thrown out plenty of stuff for bulk pickup, too – but that’s only for the real damaged goods. This stuff still works.

Now I’m also assembling all sorts of old computer parts, electronics, and telephones that will either be freely distributed or sold at a yard sale. Just about anything that isn’t nailed down is free game for redistribution. Eventually we’ll be able to completely minimize our lives and go back to eating off milk crates and sitting on bean bags! Take that, capitalism!

Yesterday morning, Lisa got up to take a shower (her schedule is based on the classes she teaches, and thus gets up earlier than me somedays and later on others). I tried to sleep in some as I was up late doing something stupid, undoubtedly. But my efforts were thwarted as she quietly woke me up – the cold water wasn’t turning off. Oh joy.

The upstairs bathroom in our place was an afterthought. And it shows. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE having a second full bath in our bedroom. But it was not designed well, and there was some obvious skimping of money (the inspector was sure it was not done by a contractor). No biggie, we hope to remodel down the line when we have real money. But I decided quickly on that we’d probably have to at least replace the fixtures in the shower as they just didn’t work well – way too loose and couldn’t be tightened.

Well, the cold water handle must have completely stripped itself inside, because nothing I did could get it to turn the water off. I took the handle off, tried to turn the plastic thingy, then the metal thingy. Finally I took a scraper to it and whacked off the cover from the wall. No dice – there was no access to the pipes from any angle. So I killed the water main. “Great!” exclaims Lisa in triumph. “No,” I said, “Now we have no water.”

After trying some of the valves in the bathroom itself, I finally restore the water and start hunting around the basement. With my incredible detective skills (and the fact that half of them didn’t turn) I finally turned something and heard the water stop running. Much to my amazement, we still had water on the first floor. I managed to just kill the cold water upstairs – who would have thought I would accomplish what I set out.

Now life is back to normal – we just ignore the shower in our bedroom for now. Two months ago I swore I would let stuff like this happen in my home. Now I’m wondering how long I’ll be able to last before breaking down and admitting it needs to be fixed. Probably once I find out where else I shut off water…

Since it was the only nominated film I actually watched, I was somewhat pleased when Crash won Best Picture last night. Well, shortly after it won, when Lisa woke me up to let me know the results. What can I say? I’m a tad rundown these days.

Unfortunately, the Oscars still pretty much stink. Jon Stewart was definitely able to make it a more enjoyable experience overall (I’m sorry, but Billy Crystal is stale and Whoopi Goldberg is just horrible – Steve Martin was the best they’ve had in decades), and there were some good presentations and even speeches. But overall, the quality of the awards has just gone downhill. It was bad enough when Gladiator was even nominated, let alone won, any awards back in 2001. Then when Return of the King swept the show two years ago, I just threw my hands up in disgust. This year I’m just happy that the awards seemed to be spread across several movies, and it didn’t just become a Brokeback award ceremony as many predicted.

Getting ready for next year’s awards, I would just like to assure all of you that Snakes on a Plane is still the name of the greatest film yet to be released – no matter what acronym IMDb tries to foist on us. Look for this film to turn the heads of many an Academy voter next year.

Seriously, not only is that blog a veritable goldmine, but you should seriously start reading the IMDb forums:

Snakes. Snakes on a plane, not in a milk-crate, not under a rock; on a plane.

So many questions. How many snakes? What kind of snakes? What kind of relationship does Sammy L have with the snakes? Does he see his childhood in their eyes? Can snakes love? Can snakes love…on a plane? Can snakes love a plane? How many pina coladas can snakes drink? How many pina coladas can Sammy L drink? How many snakes can Sammy L drink?

I just can’t wait.