March, 2008


30
Mar 08

Me Too vs. Substance

Sometimes you\'re in the weeds
Sometimes you\'re in the weeds
Substance – One of the reasons I struggle so much with creating blog posts is that there is already so much out there being said. Most of the time I’m in learning mode. I don’t feel compelled to be the socialite who says “hello” and “peek a boo” to every single person who says anything. And perhaps my hubris is that I don’t have an urge to be the first geek to make a statement on a new trend or a new technology.

And so this leaves me with little to say in the primordial blog-o-soup.

Should we advocate that each and every blog post be a significant contribution? Should everything be unique? If it’s just a me-too, well… We could always flag it as a me-too and move on, just like in the usenet and netnews bbs. I think we can recognize something is a me-too, and react to it based on that, and also be on the lookout for something unique.

Will this be yet another dimestore variety unique blog?
Will this be yet another dimestore variety unique blog?
IF Each Blog Post Said Something Unique – then we would have an online world where news would not spread. I think there literally are so many things that can be said on a topic. However, there can be hundreds of writers, blogging about the topic. The result is a lot of blog posts that have a lot of overlap with one another. And I think that’s okay, especially with only so many readers out there, and the needs to pick up the buzz. If, within then whole internet, there was only one writer per unique topic, or if each blog post was actually something unique, then it would be all the more difficult to actually bump into the news surreptitiously.

And It’s Good To Actually Apply Some Thought. The alternative is a copy-and-paste world where little is said and much is echoed. Personally, I’m going to strive to say something new, something unique. I think the quality is in the striving.

Photos by – miss pupik & moonrat42

21
Mar 08

Hard Drive Crash

DEAD Dead dead - A dead hard drive really is a pain in the keyboard
DEAD Dead dead - A dead hard drive really is a pain in the keyboard
Tuesday evening my hard drive crashed. I was on the machine, tinkering around, and then it went completely dark, as if someone pulled the powercord and the battery at the same time. This had been happening recently. But of course, instead of seeing this as a symptom of something much more sinister, I chalked it up to video drive conflict with Second Life. But alas, I wasn’t able to restart windows. It would go to the logon screen and just hang.

But the hope was that only some specific spot on the drive was corrupt, preventing it from booting, and that once I was able to mount it on a different system, I could see the data and copy it.

And then the fun began…

Wednesday, I call for help and the overnight shipments go out the door. Thursday, the shipments arrive: one unformatted replacement 100 gig ahard drive, one hard drive adapter, one USB remote 40 gig hard drive to backup my data in the future.

And so I: Installed the new unformatted drive and downloaded an image from our internal network, tried to see the old hard drive on the new system (and couldn’t,) and downloaded software from http://datadoctor.org & ran it overnight to recover the data on the old drive.

And that’s where I’m at right now. This is a very very slow process.

And so now I’m thinking about hard drive backup and recovery… OF COURSE.

… which has me looking at a number of solutions:

Drobo (& DroboShare)

CNET’s Top 5 Storage Drives and

CNET’s Top Network Attached Storage Drives

Photo by – wonderferret

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