Disaster (New Orleans.)

Disaster (New Orleans).
Jeez. I’m glad our house isn’t in a flood zone.

Follow-Up On Disaster (Not Louisiana.)

Yesterday I did a bunch of research into resurrecting blowed-up disks and found some excellent advice on making a bootable CD with disk utilities for resurrecting/repairing/recovering a drive. Following the directions, I used BootCD to build a disk image with some repair utilities and burn it to CD. I started the machine last night with the CD (BootCD does an excellent job—I highly recommend it), and ran DiskWarrior again, with minimal results—whatever I did to it, this disk is toast. I decided to settle for recovery, and ran Data Rescue X overnight to scan the entire disk thoroughly. This morning, it presented a detailed report of the entire disk and several options for recovery, which is a godsend. We may lose some files, but it looks like the majority (knocking on wood) are still present and accounted for; I just need to get them off the drive and onto a clean disk.

Update:

The secondary (newly built) disk I’d copied all the original data onto looks to be in reasonable shape. I threw it in a FireWire enclosure and it popped right up on the desktop of my powerbook, which is is a Good Thing. I’m going to wait until I get my hands on the new iBook with a Superdrive, buy about 50 DVD-R’s, and back the whole thing up manually.

Creed Guy Punk’d.

Creed Guy Punk’d.
If it’s true, that’s some funny, sad shit.

Plastic’s Albums Of All Time

Plastic’s Albums Of All Time
I don’t often read Plastic, but this is a nice Everyman listing of music that inspires new listening.

Such Bad News.

In a chain of events starting with the demise of a perfectly healthy G4 tower, we’ve been operating with some sick equipment here in the office at Idiot Central. After that tower died, I picked up a used G3 and transplanted the drive, thinking it would get us through until we could purchase a better machine.

Some flaky behavior and odd crashing convinced me that this was the wrong tack to take, so I freed up another drive, formatted it cleanly, and installed a happy new operating system. The other night, I daisy-chained both drives inside the tower and transferred about 100GB of information—pictures, music, application files, freelance files, etc. onto the new drive, and rebooted.

Neither drive wanted to come up, so I popped in DiskWarrior to straighten out any problems with the drives. What I found last night is dire, indeed. DiskWarrior is choking on the volume of bad data on the (originally fine) disk, and it can’t make heads or tails of the “new” disk. I have a few options at this point: Freak out, which is why I’m sitting here writing this and not screaming at the wall, call drivesavers, which by some accounts can cost upwards of $2,500 (and I don’t like the idea of sending my disk away to a company with no available privacy policy), or just quietly give up and start over from scratch.

I don’t know what happened, or how this got so bad so quickly. I didn’t do anything I haven’t done before, like opening the case and switching drives around, or resetting jumpers. I’m stumped, and frustrated and scared, because this represents a significant amount of our history in peril. (All our pictures prior to 2005 are backed up and fine. All my freelance work is based off my Powerbook. The majority of our application copies are backed up. But the music collection…oh, crap. And I’m sure I’m forgetting other important data that could be gone forever.)

There are actually a few more options I have in the home-remedy area; TechTool and Drive10 are available, as well as some other utilities that may be sucessful in tandem with DiskWarrior. I’m going to try them first and see if I can’t get the data off this disk before I really panic severely.

I didn’t need this.

No Time.

Drove to Hampstead and looked at some kitchen stuff this weekend. Pretty pretty cabinets. (Struggle To Resist Self Immolation Moment: standing in the stupid K-mart buying paint, on line behind two annoying, slow, rude women yelling into a cellphone, while the Carpenters sang Top of The World.) Came home and painted, painted painted. Succumbed to temptation and watched Sideways on DVD. Good movie, uncomfortable-making. Sunday spent shopping. Hunt for discounted grill at Target thwarted by policy of not holding items between stores: drove to local store, then to store on other side of beltway to be told the last grill was sold 25 minutes prior to arrival. Gave up, shopped for Cauzzis. Visited with babies, changed diapers, huffed baby smell. Yummy fresh baby smell. Returned home, scared up dinner, attempted resurrection of backup drive: “Bad boot sectors found”. Up until 1PM freelancing, working computer mojo to no avail.

Gulp.

Gulp.
Wow. I had no idea about this. I’s a good thing we’re nuking our credit card debt this month. (via)

- Whew -

This morning, my powerbook didn’t wake up from sleep. Hitting the Power button didn’t restart it either. I popped the keyboard up to see if anything was whirring inside (It’s had the strange habit sometimes of waking from sleep but not sending power to the screen, easily remedied by closing the lid and waiting for it to go to sleep again) and got a lovely whiff of burning hot electronic components. Thinking the old girl had finally given up the ghost, I began to panic, realize I had no current backup strategy for my email. Before completely freaking out, though, I pulled the battery and replaced it with one of the spares on my desk, and tried the power button. Thankfully, the Mac startup chime rang out and disaster was averted.

Given the fact that I’m planning on that new iBook next week, though, I think she’s trying to send me a signal.

Bling.

Bling.
Bling? bling!

Allah Be Praised.

This afternoon, I signed the documents for a Home Equity Line of Credit to finance Kitchen II: A Contracting Odyssey, which will be staged in a limited (I hope) run at our house this fall. We have an appointment with a kitchen consultant on Saturday to begin the process of picking out cabinets and drawer pulls and countertops and all the other assorted epherma, and it feels good to finally be on the road (after much foot-dragging, hand-wringing, research, and correspondence.)

I’ll most likely be documenting the process here or someplace close by (I’ve been toying with the idea of another sub-weblog on this site with updated information on the house renovation progress, but that would take time that I don’t currently have to set up.) from start to finish.

Small Biz Patent Info

Small Biz Patent Info
Good information on the current rules.

Bullshit Protector

Bullshit Protector
Enough said.

Hallway Painted.

Just so you don’t think we’re sitting around eating bonbons all day, here’s a picture of the upstairs hallway with the new paint job. Apologies for the color shift- it’s a little too blue here.

Taking The Bus.

Here’s a model I just spent the last day and a half building. It’s 335 polygons, and the texture map is 128x128px (it’s meant to be one of a hundred vehicles in a city scene.)

I’m happy with it—it’s probably the best model I’ve built in the last couple of weeks.

I Feel Your Pain.

I Feel Your Pain.
I’ve had this same kind of weekend before, minus the poopy diapers.

DIY Endoscope.

DIY Endoscope.
It is my firm belief that men like this have the power to change the world. Right on.

Creeping Ennui…

Not much to report around here lately; you can tell the summer blahs have got me firmly in their grip. Jen and I got a bunch of crap done around the house this weekend—the hallway is now a lovely shade of green called celadon, which is light enough to be soothing but muted enough not to send us into fits of homicidal panic. It’s an excellent transition from the downstairs to the upstairs, and provides as neutral a divider for all the other rooms as possible outside of gray. There’s a teeny little hummingbird hanging around Jen’s butterfly bush outside the kitchen window, the first one we’ve seen all year. And we finally got to enjoy the first tomato from the garden on Sunday, which was a treat.

I’m also about a day or two away from finally walking into the Apple Store and buying a new iBook. One more check (hopefully tonight) and I’ll leapfrog five and a half years into the future…

Design in Flight Is Back.

Design in Flight Is Back.

GUIdebook.

GUIdebook.
User-interface gallery from across the spectrum of computing.

Gas Prices Around The World.

Gas Prices Around The World.
OK, so maybe it’s not so bad over here. And because it’s measured in liters over in Ireland, that great deal I thought we were getting on gas turned out to be very expensive. Stupid Dumb American.