March 2006 Archives

One of my catchphrases of late has been "Luck is better than skill or smarts" or "Luck is better than a good plan". In an ideal world skill plus a good plan will win out, however when things go wrong I am happy to have some luck or maybe instinct. It especially comes in handy when I don't listen to my own advice. I am the perfect example of "Do what I say not what I do."

This week I came home twice to find my main computer at the bios screen frozen. Obviously it had rebooted on its own and then not finished booting up again. In each case simply powering off the machine and back on seemed to fix it. Yesterday morning I turned on computer and it seemed ok at first. Then I had a problem with some apps crashing. Lastly I heard what sounded like a HD spinning down. I rebooted machine and the SCSI BIOS didn't find my main drive.

Uh oh. I knew something was potentially wrong and I should have immediately backed up. Of course I didn't do that. I was unable to get drive to boot again. At that point I took the machine into work to attempt to image the drive. I spent the next 5 hours working on it. I could get drive to spin up for a bit but not for long. At one point I got the drive to work long enough to image 90% or so of it, which really didn't help since it is all or nothing. The next thing I tried was placing drive in freezer for a while. Problem was I actually got drive too cold, had to let it warm a little. I then could get the drive to spin up for a few minutes at a time but never long enough. After lots of power cycles I finally got drive to spin up and stay working long enough to image.

Thus the point of luck winning over planning. Sure if I had backed it up at the right time I wouldn't need luck, but I still want the luck. No I just have to figure out what to do about the dead drive, since it is no longer under warranty.

What does 7x18 + 3x36 + 5x73 = Not much really. In an attempt to reuse old SCSI drives I made a single ~550 GB drive. Including the drives for RAID purposes it took a total of 18 drives to get to what can essentially be bought as a single SATA drive now. This monster should be a whole lot faster than that single SATA drive, but still. It is sickening to think how much all those drives originally cost.

I got an interesting call today from Verizon. The original reason for the call appeared to be to sell me various long distance plans. I passed since I use my cell phone for free for long distance. Then they offered me a new local package which actually gives me more services (that I won't use) for less. I had to walk through it a few times just to make sure but they did in fact save me a little over $1 a month. I must say this is the first time in recent memory that a telecom company offered to save me money. Odd I thought honestly.

I finally got the new array up and working at work. This is what I call free space 5,585,625,821,184 bytes free. That is roughly 5.08 TB. Now if I could only get that for my tivo, over 500 hrs of HD which doesn't seem like a lot really.

Please go sign up at Video Game Voters. This site was created to assist in contacting senators about stopping federal laws on video games. Namely The Family Entertainment Protection Act introduced by Clinton and Lieberman.

2/17 - Heather came over and we watched the Aviator. This was a really well made movie. For me it was interesting to learn more about Howard Hughes and the times he didn't all his work with planes. It was a nice mix of historical and a little action.

3/4 - I actually watched two movies this night. I had gone out to Best Buy and picked up a few. First up was Layer Cake. This is a British film basically. It was made by and stars some of the guys from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. It is essentially a British gangster film. A nice drama with a dash of action. I really liked it up until the last 30 seconds. Just wasn't the ending I wanted.

The second movie was The Island. This is a Michael Bay film all the way, a good summer action flick. It has an interesting premise. It is based on the idea that in the near future thanks to cloning you can buy a clone of yourself that is only there for harvesting purposes. Only instead of just beings some organs it is a real person kept in captivity. Once the clones realize what is happening the action really starts. If you go into expecting an action flick you will enjoy it.

3/11 - The first movie I watched was actually on HBO HD rather than DVD, it was White Noise. This was a so so horror / thriller. I didn't go into it expecting much and still was semi dissapointed. There were a few scares, but most were pretty telegraphed. All but horror die hards can safely skip it.

The second movie I watched was Sahara. This movie is based loosey on one of Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels. I have read or listened to most of them and seeing the film version interested me. This movie is also pretty much a summer action flick. I think it did pretty good at that. The characters in it are a cross between James Bond and Macgyver and are funny to boot. It is too bad the movie didn't do very well as it would be neat to see more of the Dirk Pitt novels with these actors. If you want some good action and a few laughs it is worth a spin.

Just in case I did actually email, tried again tonight. Not sure what happened to it.

Today some pictures I took were featured on HD Beat. It helped that I featured the website in one of the pictures. The cool thing was that a friend from many years ago saw the pictures and contacted me. Small world wide web I guess. All the details of the basement are over in my HT Blog.