From the title you may think I am pondering the usefulness of computers. Not true. I think they are great. So much so that I made a career out of working with computer networks. But, sometimes I think they can cause tons of wasted time. I think that today because I needed to spend hours yesterday and today rebuilding my computer. Last Wednesday I blew my desktop away and re-installed windows xp. tuesday night I put the machine in a new case and during the move I physically destroyed a hard drive. Out of the 4 drives that I had I lost the one with the important data on it. The good news was that I made a backup of it that morning. The bad news was I didn’t get everything. I left off some less important stuff. you don’t realize how important it is until you don’t have it. But ok, there I was with a bad drive and a backup. I was feeling dam proud of myself for making a backup. Well try importing the data back off the dvd backup I had was a pain. At first I didn’t think it would work. I kept getting major bad errors when copying. I ended up throwing the dvd in my mac and restore it from there. At this point I may just leave the “personal data” like word doc’s, pdf’s and images on the mac. I didn’t want to do that, but it is turning out to be ok. Yeah, I am just grumbling. Everything seems to have turned out ok, but it took a day and a half working on and off to get things restored. That does not count all the programs I still need to reinstall on that XP machine. I will be doing that for weeks. So this week, computers have been a drain on my time, not a savings. next week hopefully will be different.
On the flip side, I am sitting here with my handy offline blog editing tool writing this blog as my trusty powerbook is taking my photo album I had backed up and sucking it into iphoto. It places them in nice categories. I have very few complaints about the program. I was also able to hack together a non-frontpage enabled version of my website on the apache server. the photo album site of 1gig of my images will take allot longer. Also not up is what I used to call the edata site. it contained data out of an access database. apache can’t read ASP files so I need to figure out PHP & Mysql to do the same thing on apache. that will take some time also. I honestly am not sure if I will take that plunge. I would have to export a bunch of data into mysql and I don’t know it that well yet to be the sole location for that data. I am so crazed about screwing up my apache server and the content that every change I make I am backing up the directory to my windows 2000 server. I just need to get comfy with everything.
Today was another lazy day. I got up late (11:30) and just bummed around all day. worked on the website and cleaning up my desktop computer. Tons of fun stuff:) I also made a ghost image backup of the desktop OS just in case. Also got the TV watching down. Trying to catch up on things I missed this week on tivo. I also watched harry potter II last night on DVD. it was ok, but they leave so much out of the book. I totally understand they cant put everything in the movie, but it is just a let down. that is probably why I didn’t see it in the theater.
My parents probably will call and want to do the traditional sunday dinner. Not sure if I am going to opt in tonight. I had pizza for lunch and that is what they do every sunday.
I am also shopping around for a new handheld PDA. everyone who knows me knows that I go through stuff like that and cell phones relatively quickly. I do a pda about once a year. This year I went through them like every 6 months. The reason I do that is because I have not yet found the perfect device for me. If I did I would stick with it, but alas I cannot find it. also my requirements change as my needs change. what I need now is totally different than what I needed when I was traveling all the time. I am thinking of a pocket pc. the palm I have is nice, and does almost all I want it to, but it does not do everything. the problem is if I switch to a pocket pc I will probably have to give up something. Either weight, wireless ability, allot of $$$ from my wallet, or a combination of the 3. I probably will go to bestbuy tomorrow during work to take a look.
