WhistlinDixie

Hope

Marc and I went to the computer store this afternoon. I guess that right around the corner here in Michigan is like the distance from my house to downtown Newark, or about fifteen minutes. Anyway, the guy at the shop is going to recover all the data from my hard drive and copy it to a hard drive that Marc brought with him. The pain is going to be that the program that is being used does not maintain directory structure, so I will have to sort through all of my files to find the ones that I want to keep. Not only that, but I think that the program doesn’t give them their correct filenames either, just the correct extensions, so it could take a very long time to find the files that I want to keep. At least they will survive. I might go ahead and save an image of my hard drive to Garrett’s computer anyway before I format it so I have that to reference against. That is assuming that I can get an adapter first. I should be able to pick it up Wednesday. For now, my laptop is sitting on my desk without a hard drive, a sad shell of what it once was.

The Wonders of the Sneaker Net

One of the programs that Garrett downloaded requires me to put my hard drive in his computer. This would normally not be any problem. However, since it is a laptop hard drive, it requires a special adapter to mount it in a desktop. While I was searching around my unit for someone who had one, I wan pointed to Marc Santa in unit 44. While he didn’t have one, he knows a guy at a computer store that is "just around the corner". When he called him, he said to bring my laptop over this afternoon and it should be ready by Wednesday. Since we both have 1:20s and he has an exam at 3:35, we plan on running over at around 4:30. The best part of the deal is that the guy will do it for free. Now how cool is that?

The Not-So-Beautiful Letdown

Aaaarrrrgggg!!!! Garrett couldn’t find SpinRite. Right now he is trying some other possibilities. Now I won’t be able to start recovery until at least tomorrow morning.

Why doesn’t my computer love me anymore? I never did anything bad to it. I loved it, protected it from viruses, firewalled it using a real firewall (ZoneAlarm), and did just about everything else in my power to keep it safe. Unfortunately, it nipped me right where it hurt. The one thing that I never did was back up my files (except my resume, which is in three different locations). I guess that I have learned my lesson. Now maybe I can convince my parents to at least help me purchase an external hard drive for backup purposes. Maybe they will cover the whole cost (wink, wink Mom). If I get a co-op for next quarter, it won’t be such a big deal since I will have a real income. Then maybe I can upgrade to a real cell phone instead of the pre-paid "plan" that I have been using for the past couple of years.

Waiting

Garrett should get back from home sometime this evening. I sure hope that he was able to find SpinRite, because I really hate data loss. I almost had it happen to me at about this same time Summer quarter. That time, though, I was staring the death of my hard drive in the face. When you start hearing clicking and thunking from your hard drive, you know that things are not good. At least I had some warning that time so I could back up my most important data before I took my laptop to Best Buy to have it serviced. (They ended up giving me a brand new laptop to replace it.)

The real irony of this weekend it that both John and Tim got together on Saturday afternoon to have a "format party" in Tim’s room. They both copied the data they wanted to keep to Tim’s desktop, then reformatted the hard drives in their laptops and reinstalled Windows. I could be up and running at this moment too, but I never got a chance to back up any data, so if I format and reinstall Windows now, it would be good bye for the data that I hope to recover. To think, if Garrett came back with the software tonight and I started it running at 8pm, I might be able to start copying data at 6pm on Monday. (It is estimated that it takes 22 hours to run this on a 60GB drive.)

Another irony that has come to be from this situation it that I have been much more active here on my blog than I have been in its almost month of existence. The really sad part is that it takes so much more effort to add stuff to it since I have to walk to the other side of the dorm just to get to the computer lab. Then I have to go and copy the source of the web page to my computer and edit it in Notepad, which is not fun since it has no coding capability built in. Then I have to go and upload my new copy to the server and see if it works. I usually end up leaving a quotation mark or angle bracket out somewhere and spend ten minutes trying to find it. Using Dreamweaver, I never forget quotes because it enters them automatically, and it also has a tool that will run a check on the page to make sure that it is good.

Anyway, here’s to data recovery. Cheers!

Withdrawal

I miss my computer. I feel so sad looking at it sit on my desk, unable to do anything. I hope Garrett can get SpinRite, because I don’t want to lose all of my pictures that I have taken, or the papers that I have written, or the programs that I have spent countless hours downloading. It just isn’t right. Computers should never do this to you. A fragile man like me just can’t take the pain caused by the abrupt separation from the world around him. The worst part is that I am not getting any more homework done without the distraction of my computer than when it was working fine.

Even if I have only been IMing for a little more than a month, and at that did it infrequently, I still miss it. Just the thought that people that I know are just a click away is so comforting. By the way, sorry CJ that I never got back with you after you suddenly disconnected, but it was about time for Phys lab anyway. By losing IM, getting plans together for next weekend will be a pain. After all, who reads their email anymore?

I can’t wait for next weekend! I get to go home Thursday after I get out of Social Science (ick). Then, Friday evening, I get to go to the Supertones concert! Don’t know who I will be going with, though. Chief said that a friend of his might be there, but I haven’t talked with him in close to a month. CJ has to work Friday night and Kristen is unavailable (don’t know why). My Mom is insisting that I go with someone and that if I can’t find someone, then she will go with me, since she likes the Supertones too. On Saturday afternoon, I might go hang out with CJ some. Who knows?

Sounds like some of us guys might get together and play euchre and Texas hold ‘em tonight. However, I still have six chapters (about 130 pages) to read on Critical Thinking for Social Science this weekend, plus I have to finish my Discreet Math, which I am completely lost on, and I want to write my extra credit assignment for Humanities so I don’t have to worry about it later. If I actually get that done, I might actually start working on my Humanities term paper, which has a first draft due on March 8th. Maybe I can get Maryanne to help me with it. I found out at the CIA main meeting last night that she loves writing, the exact opposite of me. Maybe with a little help from her I can actually get a decent grade on a writing assignment for once.

Repetition

Not a day after I finish my rant on Microsoft, they struck back in the nastiest way possible: they destroyed the partition table on my hard drive. For all you out there who don’t have a clue what i just wrote, it means that while all of my information is still on my hard drive, the computer doesn’t have the slightest clue where it is, so to it, my hard drive is empty. I am currently writing this on a lab computer since mine is obviously not working.

Anyway, back to why this happened in the first place. In the process of installing Norton GoBack, you must restart your computer to finish the installation. Upon restarting, everything was looking good, the Norton GoBack splash screen came up and so did the Windows boot screen. However, a few seconds after the boot screen came up, Windows bluescreened and automatically rebooted. This had me a little worried, but it had happened before. After it did this five times in a row, I realized that something was wrong.

I booted off of the Windows XP install CD and entered the recovery console. I ran the fixmbr and fixboot commands, hoping that they would remove GoBack from startup so I could get into Windows again. When I rebooted, I got an error that NTLDR was not found and that I should press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart. NTLDR is a system file that loads Windows XP upon boot, so this was not a good sign. I rebooted with the XP CD and entered the recovery console. However, when I entered it did not ask me what Windows installation I wanted to log into. When I tried to copy ntdlr from the CD to my computer, I was told that the operation could not be performed. It turns out that the fixmbr command that I had run earlier had destroyed the partition table. Why must Microsoft make commands that say "fix" when they destroy like they did to me.

So, it will at least be Monday before my computer will be running again. Garrett is going to try to dig up some software for me that will let me recover all of my important files over the weekend. The program looks like it will take about 22 hours to run on my size hard drive Once I have copied all of my files, I get to format my hard drive and start back over again from scratch. Not fun.

Microsoft is Evil

Really, must I say more?

I just got an email from the Hotmail team telling me that no new accounts that are created on Hotmail will be accessible through Outlook or Outlook Express (and in extension, Mozilla Thunderbird). This might not sound too major since I have had my Hotmail account since 2000. However, they state that this exemption is only existent at this time, leaving open the possibility of them shutting down this service to all customers. The only way to access Hotmail with an external client will be to use their new Microsoft Office Outlook Live service. They include Microsoft Outlook 2003 as part of the package, but this hardly justifies paying $59.95 a year for what was previously free to all. One of the perks of their service is that you will get 2GB of storage (compared to gMail’s 1GB) plus the ability to send attachments of up to 20MB.

Due to this sudden and unwelcome piece of news, I just invited myself to use gMail so that I can slowly move away from Hotmail forever. It’s not like I enjoyed using it. The internet interface was slow and ad-laden and to use it with email clients other than Outlook and OE, you had to get extra programs to do the job for you (I use HotPop) that slow the communication down. This performance dip is unwelcome, especially since services such as gMail allow direct POP access to their mail, which incurs little overhead.

In conclusion, Don’t use Hotmail except to try to get spam and viruses to destroy their servers!!!!! ‘Nough said.

Adios Brent

Today marks the last day of Brent Grenda’s time at Kettering University. You may recognize his name from the artwork of his that is featured on the Unit 41 pics page. He will start classes at Oakland University next quarter. His reason for leaving is that he decided that being an engineer is just not for him. Those of us who heard kind of scratched our heads. After all, we are all engineering majors, so decisions such as this tend to baffle us. Really though, what else is there?

Movie Night

You know, sometimes staying up till 5 in the morning watching movies can be real fun. Last night I watched The Shining (original version with Jack Nicholson from 1980) and Pulp Fiction with Tim, John, and Carlos. The Shining was the first movie to send chills of horror down my spine in a long, long time. The woman in the bath tub in Room 237 was just wrong, the little girls were creepy, and the cameo by the Cowardly Lion while Wendy is trying to find Danny so they can escape was very random, but spooky none the less. After a short break so Tim could call his girlfriend at 1:30 in the morning, we settled in to watch Pulp Fiction. Good for some laughs, but that could have been due to the fact that I was getting pretty tired by then. Anyway, two great movies that were definitely worth staying up until 4:30 in the morning to see.

13 days until the Supertones concert! Can’t wait!

Valentines Day and All That It Entails

An excerpt from Social Science today:

He continued to lecture us on dating and "rating" for the rest of class, or about 45 minutes. I found it slightly comical that this man who I think has never been married was lecturing on the topic. That and that he wrote SEX on the black board. Maybe that is a little bit of immaturity showing through on my part. He basically said that men were in dating for the sex and women were in it for the money. He also explained the brutal cycle that kept most couples of the time from getting anywhere in their relationships.