WhistlinDixie

I’m Back!

After a very long night and most of this morning and afternoon, I finally have my computer back up and running. There were a few things that I couldn’t recover, but I’ll be downloading them again. There are a few small quirks that I still have to iron out, but it should all be good. I am currently copying the entire contents of my hard drive to my new external hard drive I would use Norton Ghost, but that was one of the few things that I was not able to recover. Also, since I didn’t use the restore DVD, I also don’t have Norton AntiVirus anymore. I am using AVG (free) while I try to obtain an actual copy of Norton.

One Step Closer

I just spent the last couple of hours recovering files. Unfortunately, it was not as easy as just telling it to recover my user profile folder. Instead, I had to tell it to recover all of the files in each folder, and repeat this process for each folder, making sure to keep the folder names and folder structure the same. Another slight complication is that it will not recover files to folders with periods in them. This means that I have to recover them to a folder without periods in its name, and them copy them to the correct folder. This becomes time consuming quickly.

Unfortunately, some of the larger files that I had are being troublesome. When I try to recover them, it says that there is an error and I have to abort that file. The only possible solution that I know of is to recover directly off of the hard drive instead of the image that I made to save time. So, right now I am scanning for partitions, again, on my laptop hard drive It should be complete by the morning, so that I can start to recover files again. With my schedule, I won’t have time to get back to it again until tomorrow evening at the earliest. Maybe I’ll be back online around midday Saturday.

So Close, But Yet, So Far

Well, checked on the progress of the recovery this morning, and it all looked good. I told it to recover all of my user profile to my new external hard drive At first, it estimated 4 hours to finish. It quickly changed to 1 minute and then finished. I was slightly puzzled at how it had copied over 7 GB of data in about a minute and a half. I opened up the folder that it had been recovered to and I saw all of my files. When I dug deeper into My Music folder, I saw that the files were there, but when I hovered the mouse over them, I noticed that each file had a size of 0 bytes. In other words, the file had been created, but contained no data. I was slightly irritated and started running simple scans on all of the detected partitions. Then, the program crashed. This means that I will have to scan the hard drive all over again, about a 10-12 hour process in all. To help it go faster, I am now copying an image of the hard drive to another hard drive that is much faster. By doing this, the preliminary scan goes from taking 5 hours to a little less than an hour. It will take around four and a half hours to create the image (compressed to save space), but things should go much faster after that. Maybe I’ll be up and running again by the weekend. Or at least I’ll start on that road since my term paper will be finished by then.

On The Road to Somewhere

[Excitement!] I got my hands on a copy of Active@ Undelete 5.1. I ran a preliminary scan on my hard drive, and all of the files appeared! I have to run the scan again, but I should have all of my files by the end of the day. Then, I can start reinstalling everything on my laptop. Finally, it may all be coming to an end.

Progress and Miscellany

Yeah, my hard drive adapter came in the mail today. Right now I am working on Tim’s computer trying to get my data back. So far, all I have found is my Firefox profile. Not what I wanted, but it is a start.

You know when a class is bad when your teacher exclaims at the start of class that they are tired of the subject and that it has no real application in the field. I think that everyone in the class almost jumped for joy when Prof. Stanchev told us that today in Discrete Math. Finally, we know that he hates it just as much as we do. I also heard from one of the kids in the class that Dr. Geske, the former head of the Computer Engineering department, has the same thoughts. I say, why not just get rid of the course? It sounds pretty worthless to me.

Content Stop

Yeah, I go home, where everything is, and give you nothing. That’s how it generally works when I have lots of crap to do. No Quebec pictures, look for them around the first part of April. No Supertones pictures because my camera broke. The latter disappoints me the most since I will never have pictures from the concert. However, the hard copies of the Quebec pictures will never go away. Sorry to all of you who were looking forward to seeing them.

I’m Back

Well, the weekend is over, and I really cannot find a way to classify it. At times, it was great, and at times, it sucked.

Let’s start on Friday morning. I take a shower, I’m feeling good. However, when I go to get a shirt out of my bag, I realized that I had forgotten to bring any shirts home with me. Luckily, I had one shirt that I had left at home that I might consider wearing. I ended up wearing it on Friday. I ended up going out to lunch with my parents at Garfield’s. When we were done, my Dad went home and I went to Elder Beerman with my Mom to go buy a shirt so I would have something to wear on Saturday. When I got home, I helped my Dad with my car, and then started reading "My Ántonia" for humanities.

The night soon came around and I found myself at The Avenue in Tipp City for the Supertones concert. When the first act, The Wedding, came onto stage, I pulled out my digital camera and prepared to take pictures. Only problem was, it didn’t turn on. I quickly dumped the batteries and put in the new pair that I had brought with me. Unfortunately, same result. Throughout the concert, I fiddled with it, but it never worked. Anyway, after The Wedding performed, the special guest, Edison Glass, performed a short two song set. Then, it was time for Roper. I guess that the people in attendance were a little bit more into them than I was. While I wasn’t too keen on their music, they do know how to entertain. Their lead singer, Reese Roper, is a real goofball. Who else, in their right mind, would drink straight Tabasco sauce in the middle of a song, while he has a chest cold. Finally, it was time for the Supertones. Unfortunately, they were without their trumpet player. For a couple of songs, the drummer for The Wedding played trumpet, and did a pretty good job too. For the rest, it was up to us, the audience, and the band to help sing the missing trumpet part. It was a blast. They ended giving two encores. The last song that they played was "Adonai", the first song off of their first CD. Ended up getting home around 1:30 Saturday morning.

Saturday, I got to reading "My Ántonia". Because of this, I never got a chance to hook up with CJ so we could hang out for a while. Sorry ’bout that. My Dad ended up going to Best Buy and getting me an external hard drive I’ll make sure to put it to good use. That is, as soon as I can get my data recovered and reinstall everything. Maybe I will be up and running by the end of the quarter.

Today, not much. I was hoping to be out the door between 1:30 and 2:00, but didn’t end up leaving until around 3:45. Stupid book. The drive back to Kettering was uneventful, though I hope that gas stations will start posting that they do not accept credit cards by the road so I don’t have to wait in line to see it plastered all over the pump. What a waste of time. One positive of all of the delays was that I ended up stopping in Upper Sandusky for dinner. So, you say, why does that matter any way? Because there was a cute chick at the register at Wendy’s. She reminded me of Kim, but was cuter in some way. Maybe it was the freckles, who knows? Those of you who know me well might be slightly disoriented by my mention of a girl’s looks. I would like to take this time to remind you that I do indeed have hormones, just like the rest of you, it’s just that I do a very good job of repressing them. Maybe too good a job. Any comments, ladies?

Anyway, I find myself back in my dorm room after a relaxing weekend at home. Now that I have finished my reading for Social Science tomorrow, I can go to bed with dreams of my Humanities term paper dancing in my head. A girl would be preferable, but who has time for that when finals are just around the corner and you have a term paper due at the end of the week that you haven’t even started yet. Oh well, here’s to a brighter and more care free future.

I’m Goin’ Home!

Yeah! I’m going to be leaving here around 4 o’clock, arriving home around 9 o’clock. I can’t wait to get home. Unfortunately, my weekend of supposed fun looks like it will be dedicated to writing the first draft of my Humanities term paper. On the upside, I do get to go to the Supertones concert on Friday night and see CJ on Saturday. Might have other plans, but nothing concrete yet. I’ll be leaving Sunday afternoon and arriving back on campus sometime Sunday night. I have, like, 13 hours of driving this weekend. Don’t ask about the miles.

I’m not going to update the site over the weekend since I will not have the availability of a fast connection to the school’s servers. Also, don’t get your hopes up about seeing the Quebec picture gallery. I wonder if I’ll even have enough time this weekend to finish the term paper, let alone scan a bunch of pictures. The new date to watch for is the beginning of April. I’ll be back home then and actually have some time. I just wonder how long it will take to upload it all via a dial-up connection.

Well, that sucks, don’t it?

Got my hard drive back from the computer store today. After I finished my physics lab practical, I installed the hard drive that was supposed to have the recovered data on it in Tim’s computer so I could sort through the data and find what I wanted to keep. When I looked at the contents of the drive, I thought that I would have a long and arduous process before me, going through all of the folders, which had names like FLD010. With names like that, who knows what could be in them. I thought that I would start with a search for zip files so I could find my downloads folder. I got no hits for a single file that would have been in that folder. Discouraged, I tried to search for my music, but only found about 400MB of the 1.5GB that I have. At this point, I lost all hope. I tried to search for a few more things, but ultimately came up empty handed.

Now, I get to wait for the 44-to-40 pin IDE adapter to arrive in the mail so I can hook up my laptop hard drive in Garrett’s computer and try some of the software that he has downloaded. It supposedly got shipped today, but I’m not sure if it will get here since I forgot to insert the whole "1700 W Third Ave" part of the address. At least the zip code is only for Kettering. Maybe that will get it delivered here anyway. For now, my hard drive will remain untouched, without any OS installed on it, in hopes of someday getting some software that will recover all of my files.

Let it Snow, Remix

Yo, dig this phat remix (parody, actually) of Let it Snow. What can I say, an idle mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Oh, the weather outside is frightful,
and its sight, so spiteful.
Since I’ve got places to go,
stop the snow, Stop The Snow, STOP THE SNOW!!!!!!!

Cool, ain’t it? Who knows what I’ll come up with next?