Ugh!
AAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.
On 5-24-04, I pushed the wrong button.
Tivo had been on the fritz for a couple weeks. You’d be watching a program or moving through the menus and it would make this clicking noise. If it made at least two clicking noises in a row, the screen would freeze for a few seconds or longer. Actually, I had seen this problem a couple years ago when the Tivo was younger. I shut the Tivo off for a day and it got better. I -should- have looked into the problem more thourouly then but it just fell off as a priority.
Well, just before my folks got back from Florida, it died entirely. It would click and get stuck 3 minutes after booting and that would be that. So I had to fix it myself. I was having the normal frustrating time of it… swapping hard drives in and out of my PC. Some would boot, some wouldn’t, depending where they were in the IDE chain. It was a bit frustrating but nothing I couldn’t handle. Until it happened.
I noticed that I had successfully put the Tivo image onto my 200 gig Maxtor drive instead of my 40 gig Maxtor drive. The two look very similar but are very different inside. One drive is a scrap, lying around from…. I don’t even recall where it’s from. The other is my system drive, the one everything is on. Everything. I instantly became very unhappy.
Flash forward 3 full days of recovery time and I’m finally back online. It took days to pull the backups from TJIC’s computer (mini-moral: don’t zip up and send a single 5 gig file as a backup. If there’s an error in retrieving it, you’ll have to fetch the whole 5 gig file over again… which sucks because it takes 20+ hours to move 5 gig over a cable modem.)
I’m still not recovered by a long shot. For example, I’m writing this blog using notepad instead of Frontpage because [deep inhale] since I was going to try out the new Office 2003, I figured it would be good if I installed it fresh on the “new” computer; all is well except that Outlook 2003 Pro apparently doesn’t come with Frontpage but MS Word as an HTML editor. Trouble with that is that Word vomits all over my HTML with idiotic MS formatting shit (it vomits shit, now that’s a pretty picture). I also installed VMware workstation and it works peachy except eMule won’t stay online. And I’ve got nothing going on in my life except what I make of it and I’m sitting in my parents basement doing nothing with my life. But that’s just me.
My parents arrived and prompty went to the store and bought duplicates of every food item in the house. Which wouldn’t be so bad except:
- I asked them multiple times not to do this very thing before they came home, the day they arrived and subsequently.
- I spent $250 filling the kitchen with exactly the foods they wanted and then pointed out that the kitchen was full.
- Now, the cupboards are so full that (and this has happened many times in the past) they won’t be able to find what they’re looking for and they’ll buy EVEN MORE duplicates
- Much of the duplicates of food they bought will spoil after sitting in the fridge for weeks.
- I spent much of the winter eating foods I didn’t particularly care for in an effort to rid the house of duplicate foods before they spoiled. Next winter (if I’m here) I’ll barter/give the food away to friends instead.
I had planted several things from seed, anaheim peppers, hungarian peppers, nasturtium, Sweet 100’s tomatoes, and morning glories. I asked my dad what the proper time to plant was and he replied “they have to go in the ground May 15th.” So, in an effort to grow early, I put all the plants under lights starting April 6th. Well, as any gardener will tell you, I planted a month too late for planting from seed in a small garden.
There are people power washing the deck. When they came to out place, they moved all the planters that were against the railing into the middle of the deck. Of course, my morning glory vines were growing out of the pots and wrapped around the deck railing. The pots were in the middle of the deck, the vines were still on the railing. Scratch 5 of 6 morning glory plants from seed. I wanted to cry and apologize to Julie.
Update: Some of the morning glories are coming back. That would be nice but I realize I’m overly emotionaly invested in morning glories.
I got home one day last week and found that they had gone plant shopping for the outside. As I knew they would, they got all the standard annual crap. Plus hungarian peppers, something almost exactly anaheim peppers, and a few tomoto plants with unknown heredity; maybe they’re Big Boys, maybe they’re Sweet 100’s. One tomato plant was obviously not a Sweet 100; I’m glad they’re planting that.
My sister has left a lot of crap in the space I’m currently living. She was in the space before me, about 2 years ago. I found a big box of girlie stuff under the bathroom sink taking up a lot of space and asked her to remove it “from my bathroom.” She came back instantly and said that it wasn’t “my” bathroom. That bothered me. I didn’t bite as agressively as I might have when I responded, “Well then could you remove your things from the bathroom I am currently using?” It took 3 weeks for her to finally take the box (though it might actually still be hidden in some closet somewhere upstairs)
Oh, in other computer news: I was recovering data from the newly deceased hard drive, putting it onto a 40 gig drive I had lying around. I spent a day (yes, a full day) pulling lost clusters and crap off the 200 gig drive. I was probably pulling too much off it but I knew that I had only one shot at this; after I reformatted the hard drive, everything would be lost. So I spent a day at this and I get home after going out… the drive is making grinding noises! Short story short: the drive died. Well, I always wanted to open up a drive and see what’s really inside.
My $500 ad in that church newsletter has been in for about 3 weeks and it hasn’t generated a single phone call.
Good news: After fiddling with Ontrack Easy Recover for 1 1/2 days, I recovered -everything- from the old 200 gig drive.
I posted a personal on polymatchmaker.com. It feels weird. But I posted it.
A client of mine, A.P. told me that he wants me to sign up for eharmony.com and run it though its paces because he has a friend he thinks could use such a service. He wants me to vet the service for him. A.P. will pay for my account and everything. Actually, I think he’s just perceptive and believes I would benefit from it. A.P. has quickly become a friend. I’ll sign up soon.
So this post has a lot of grumbling minutia. Sorry but that’s how I feel right now.
[Grumble]