Month: November 2003

Stuff

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Last night I got my new Firewire 200 Gig hard drive. I plugged it into my Powerbook and an icon for it came up on my desktop. That was all I needed to do in order for me to start using it. They sent a CD along with the drive, but it must have been only for windows. I love Mac’s. That was the easiest upgrade I can remember.

I already started offloading data from my powerbooks hard drive onto the firewire drive. Next up is getting quicktime pro and pulling some of my MPEG-1 files into Final Cut Express and editing them for burning to a DVD.

I also received my Dad’s flash memory key chain. I got him a pen sized usb flash drive that holds 512megs of memory. he will use it to shuttle data back and forth between work. not sure how fast it will be but it is USB 2.0.

Monday I ordered his new computer. I settled for a dell. It is probably overkill for his needs, but he likes over kill.

I for one have been shuttling ISO images from work to home. I think I recovered almost all the images now. I just copied over ISO’s for red hat and FreeBSD 4.7.

Treo 600 GSM

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Handspring finally announced the GSM version of the Treo 600. that is the good news. the bad news is that it won’t be actually shipping until November 17. The really bad news is that they are only selling it for Cingular right now. I use T-Mobile and I actually don’t want to switch. I am planning on switching my “good” phone number to T-Mobile on November 24 when number portability becomes available.

Until T-Mobile releases the 600 or until something else comes along I will stick with my Treo 270. I am finding I am using it allot more than I used to. Stuff falls into and out of favor with me all the time. this time last year I was looking to sell the dam Treo.

Dinner

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I was planning on going to dinner with my parents tonight. The powers that be may have other ideas. I am stuck on the LIRR in Penn Station. There is a disabled train in the tunnel so we are going no where. We are already 15 minutes late with no end in sight.

This is the second time in 2 weeks that something like this has happened. I am not happy about this. I get to pay $150 per month for the privilege of sitting on a train and waiting.

I am delayed 25 minutes now and no end in sight. I wish I brought a book or synced avantgo before I left the office. At least I have 58% battery life on the powerbook now:)

The latest update. It has been 35 minutes delayed. We are now moving. They opened the doors telling passengers that they can get off and try to get on another one since we were delayed. I got upstairs and the entire concourse was packed with people. I ran down stairs and got back on the train just before the doors closed again. Like half the people on the train got off. 2 minutes later they announce they are going to back out of penn and go around to another track. then a minute later they said the tracks were clear and we left normally. the train was almost empty but we left. I am glad I decided to head back to the train, or else I would be stuck on a some packed local that would be delayed for ages.

Lets hope I can still make dinner. Well a cell phone call later confirmed that I did in fact miss dinner.

A Day Off For Someone

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Keith took the day off today. Sometimes when we are short staffed we get slammed with work. It can be very stressful. Other days we don’t get slammed with work, and I can actually get paperwork and other projects done. When that happens and Keith is out of the office it is nice for me. I get our office all to myself. It is a different atmosphere. I can can play music if I want.

I finished rebuilding my desktop computer. I also got a project plan completed for a new project I am working on. I also took care of some vendor issues that I had outstanding.

Gus and I were going to go out for drinks tonight to celebrate my promotion, but we wanted to bring dan at the last minute. He had a conflict. We wanted to bring him since he got promoted also today. Gus can’t go tomorrow so dan and I will go have a few drinks. We are trying to round up a few people for that.

Gus is out the end of this week, so my plans to goto Kingston are on hold until he gets back.

The Two Desktop’s

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I fixed my broken desktop at work yesterday. The floppy drive wouldn’t eject or take disks. I still use floppies for booting and drivers disks so I needed to fix it. turns out it was just a broken piece of decretive plastic that was blocking the drive. all fixed now.

My desktop at home has XP back on it. I also got all the security updates on it, but I still have not had time to install any applications. I will do that over the next few weeks.

With my hard drive disaster I forgot to mention I blew away my 2003 server and rebuilt it. I wasn’t using exchange so I went back to imail. I still want to get exchange working at work, but I need my mail to be up at home until I figure out exchange 2003.

It’s Tuesday

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Today is a bit nasty in NYC, but it is cooler than yesterday. That makes me very happy. I got up early and made the really early train. I used to take it all the time but not it is difficult to make it. It is an express from my stop all the way to Penn Station.

Just saw something not so pretty. Some lady was doing her makeup. She was even plucking and pressing her eyelashes. I mean on a public train, what are you thinking? Some things never change either. Their is a group of older people sitting in front of me playing bridge. They always sit in the same car on the same train playing bridge. It is kind of cool. Whenever I take this train I sit in same car so I see them.

My mind is on what to have for breakfast today. My stomach is letting me know that it needs food soon. I might splurge and go for a bacon sandwich! We shall see when I get to work.

I saw my old boss Jeff yesterday while walking to work. He is going to come by the office Thursday to see everyone. Or everyone who has been around long enough to remember him. He thought I was blowing him off when I told him I was sick. But I really was so he just smiled and said, sure you were! I think we will go to lunch afterward.

More Data Recovery

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I got most of the OS ISO disks recovered today. thankfully I had most of them at work. I am still missing some programs but I think I can find them on some backup’s. The rest of the really recent stuff I can always get if I find I need it later.

Most of the video’s off Tivo are lost forever. The VMWare Virtual Servers were also lost. I had allot of them backed on my laptop and work, but some of the configurations I had are lost. I will copy what I have at work tomorrow and bring it back home. I was trying to make a basic VMWare configuration for every OS that I use so I have it if I need to use it.

I also began to robocopy (like rsync, but using a windows resource kit utility) to sync my applications folder up with a drive on my 2003 server. I have realized that I cannot back everything up to DVD anymore. I just have too much stuff. Some things can get backed up, but most will have to sit on more than 1 disk drive. Either that or get a DLT system that I don’t want to get.

Well I am off to bed. My hands are starting to hurt. I need a good night sleep since it will be a long day tomorrow. Keith is taking the day off. As much as I bust on him for stuff, he does good work. He just needs supervision. And if he is reading this, hey Keith you know I am telling the truth!

As the tag below will state I wrote this while listening to one of my all time favorite songs. I am not as big a Creed fan as I used to be, but this song still rocks!

This entry was written while listening to Higher from the album “Human Clay” by Creed

Recovery

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So I found a bunch of the video’s that I thought I lost. I still have the video tape originals for most of what I didn’t recover. that is the good news. the bad news is that I only found 30% on backup’s.

My Application backup CD’s also had some error’s on certain program’s. I think they were older versions of stuff, so I am not worried that much. The down side is that I have to go out onto the internet and get ISO’s for Red Hat, BSD, etc. They are gig’s and gig’s of downloads that I need to do again. I will see if I have any of the missing stuff at work.

This recovery has taught me some things. One thing to note is that burning a CD or DVD as backup does not always work. I was able to recover most of what I did have on DVD, but some stuff gave me errors on the restore. I am going to keep everything I have on two different disks. I will sync them regularly. I have wanted to do that in the past but never had a problem with my DVD and CD-ROM backups.

Data Loss

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I may have made a huge tactical error. I went to reinstall windows XP on my desktop at home today. I have 2 drives in it. A 18 Gig 15,000 RPM SCSI drive for the OS, and a 180 Gig IDE drive for all my stuff. So to reinstall XP I just formatted the SCSI drive and expected to just have the data stay safe on the second drive. I have done it before. Always no problem. Well the problem I realized after it was too late was that Windows trys to install on the first IDE drive it can find. It doesn’t matter what you set your system to do. I wanted the SCSI drive to be the master. It didn’t care what I wanted if an IDE drive was present. I lost everything. The correct way to do this was to have removed the IDE drive and built windows. I didn’t figure that out until I lost all my data.

Now I have backups. All my personal files (documents, photo’s, music, etc) is on my mac and safe. I also did a DVD backup 2 weeks ago. What I did loose was all the shows I pulled off Tivo and didn’t have a chance to burn to DVD. I also lost any programs I downloaded and didn’t get to DVD. The last time I did that was the end of July 2003. I am bound to have lost stuff that has changed since then. Not a catastrophic mistake, but a big pain in the ass. I also lost tons of backups that I had. I was doing a project where I took all my old backup CD’s and put them to DVD so I didn’t have so many disks lying around. That project is bust now that all the copies on the hard drive are gone.

I don’t know why I am so calm about this right now. I truly don’t know what really needed and lost.

One think I do know is that I am going out tomorrow and getting a 200 gig firewire hard drive to put my stuff on. I am not taking any chances again. I have been pondering buying one for a while, but now I am going to do it.

If this was at work it would never have happened. Why am I more careful with other people’s stuff compared to my stuff? I guess I cannot get yelled at for messing my own stuff up!

OK, now I am a little pissed that I screwed this up. Not much stuff is lost forever, but what pisses me off is that it will take me months to get everything and organize it the way it was. I think that is what pisses me off the most.

I am now making a DOS bootable disk so I can wipe the large drive again so it doesn’t have an OS on it. Then I can remove it and build my computer with the SCSI drive in it and then insert the IDE drive back and use it as a secondary drive. if you are asking why don’t I just use the IDE drive as my primary drive, the answer is that it has more space. I need it for my stuff. the 18 gig drive is large enough for my OS and applications.