Month: November 2004

Good News, Everyone!

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Who rocks the house? I do. Close to everything on my crashed 200GB hard drive is salvageable. It took some time to get it set up, including having to reinstall Windows on my newer 250GB drive, hacking the Registry to allow large hard drives before upgrading to WinXP SP2, using the DISKPART utility in conjunction with the Drive Manager console program, and trying my best not to give in during the entire process and just formatting the drive, losing a whole bunch of junk.

The good news is I saved the receipt for the crashed hard drive, and I spent an extra $20 for a two year extended warranty. I’m going to make the $20 worth it this weekend by taking the drive back and getting a replacement. That is, of course, after I’m done copying everything I can salvage from the old drive to the newer one.

Major Crash

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My primary hard drive in my desktop computer crashed. I’m not sure exactly what the cause was, but I’m leaning towards the SHOUTcast station I was running. A few days ago, I moved the player and encoder to my laptop, which was reading all the music from the desktop over ethernet. The stream was then connecting through the ethernet to the desktop, where I was running the broadcast part of the software and where all incoming connections were directed. I think it was just too much disk activity.

I started the salvage late last night, and I was able to fix the hardware level problem. So far, all I know is that the Windows XP System directory was corrupted. Hopefully I didn’t lose much else, since I don’t have back-ups.

Considering I keep my financial information on my laptop and email on my webserver, I’m probably okay. It’s possible I could lose a large amount (about 100 GB of a 200 GB drive) of music files which have taken a long time to download or digitize. I had already moved all my video projects to a second hard drive (a 250 GB drive), so that will most likely be unaffected.

I also had many, many software packages that took a long time to acquire. I should have backed those up onto DVD+R. I’ll update when I’m at home and can see what’s remaining. Luckilly, I know I haven’t lost anything “important.” My desktop was reaching the time for the one-year Windows XP wipe, anyway.

Unrelated: Today’s search query: What are the effect of Illiteracy

More Visitors

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I suppose I should welcome all the visitors I’m getting from BlogExplosion. Thanks for coming and I hope you’ll stay for more than thirty seconds.

BlogExplosion is a weblog “browser” that credits you for every blog you view for thirty seconds, enabling other people to visit you. Thus, your credits are depleted and you have to view more blogs.

I’ve seen a few recurring trends. Everything else, like mine, is just pretty average. Interestingly, there is definitely a lack of techie blogs in the BlogExplosion system. Maybe those guys aren’t concerned with getting random people to visit their websites for thirty seconds and never come back.

Firefox 1.0 Released

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Get Firefox. The software, for browsing the internet (like Microsoft Internet Explorer, only better) has now had an official release. There are many, many reasons why this browser is better. For all intents and purposes, significant programming updates on Internet Explorer ended years ago, although they say there might be some updates for the new version of Windows. Who knows when that will be, and why wait until then when there is something better available? Read some of the reviews and then try it for yourself.

I Don’t Enjoy Being Short

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They say a person should embrace those things about himself he cannot change. Well, I do for the most part, but every once in a while I’m reminded of my shortcoming. Here I am delivering a first place trophy and banner to a school at a marching band show last weekend.

I suppose it’s all relative. The three guys standing next to me were likely the tallest members of that particular high school band.