Life and stuff

Holy mother of g*d, there’s about 1.4 GB of trip pics to sift through. Looks like Ray has already started blogging his take on the trip. More to come soon …

(much much later …)
As an addendum to this post, this’ll be the first (and last) time I bother merging pictures and weeding duplicate shots. For the curious, the starting file count was somewhere between 1400 and 1500 images, weeded down to about 850 images at 730-some MB. It didn’t help that Ray and David’s camera clocks are off by some minutes or hours, and ACDSee had a batch time convert which didn’t change the right EXIF field so I had to manually sync them. Anyhow, I should have some “things” and “stuff” for your viewing pleasure soon.

Merry Christmas everyone!

An oldie but goodie:

A rather interesting article from the LA Times on a new generation of “smart drugs”.

It would be hard to imagine improving on the intelligence of computer engineer Bjoern Stenger, a doctoral candidate at Cambridge University. Yet for several hours, a pill seemed to make him even brainier.

Participating in a research project, Stenger downed a green gelatin cap containing a drug called modafinil. Within an hour, his attention sharpened. So did his memory. He aced a series of mental-agility tests. If his brainpower would normally rate a 10, the drug raised it to 15, he said.

“I was quite focused,” said Stenger. “It was also kind of fun.”

WARNING! Geek terminology liberally sprinkled throughout this story/rant. Don’t say you haven’t been warned …

Thank you Microsoft, you’ve made my Saturday morning suck ass. And its not the usual Internet Explorer spyware or worm crap that most people complain about nowadays. That stuff I kinda expect sooner or later. This was more along the lines of an “OMFG you call this thing fit for a SERVER?!” incredularity.

In a nutshell, I had swapped out my old boot drive for a new 300GB monster, so time for an Windows rebuild. As old as it is, I still create a small 4GB partition and threw Win98 on there for diagnostics or recovery in case its needed. The old fdisk command wasn’t working, so out came a Fedora linux disc to create the FAT partition, then a reboot to the Windows disc to run the actual install. That went fine and dandy, and I had the ugly greenish desktop staring at me a little while later. Just for kicks, I load up Windows Update and then reboot when it says to. Or attempt to at least — Win98 somehow managed to lock up when shutting down and scrambled the entire partition it was sitting on. I’ll chalk this one up to that very old drive cache flushing bug that “may cause data corruption.” Heh.

Round 2, reinstall Win98. Same stuff, but a bit more successful on patching. Now for Windows 2003. The setup runs as usual, and I get to the drive partitioning section. The new drive shows up as expected with a FAT32 partition and “unpartitioned space.” What wasn’t expected was that a 200GB drive also showed up as being “unpartitioned.”

“Unpartitioned…?” That was an NTFS partitioned drive with 150GB data on there… sh*t.

I delude myself with the thought “I’ve seen it happen before, it’ll come back once I fiddle with the boot record.” On with the install! Server 2003 loads up fine and pretty, and I have disk manager re-initialize the 200 gigger. No dice. Doh! Well, Linux can do NTFS mounts, so let me try Fedora in recovery mode. Nope. Billy Gates was emphatically telling me “you lose.”

Time for some google-lovin’. “Active Partition Recovery” sounded promising, so I grab a demo, reboot to DOS, and give it a spin. Several times. Normal scan, “deep” scan, everything scan, the results kept coming back negative. A few more partition recovery utilities fly by with no results as Bill Gates cackles on.

#$^@ing Microsoft! I’d just blown over 4 hours on data recovery, and I was not a happy camper. Back to google and forum browsing, where I find that people seem to like GetDataBack for desperate situations. I was pretty close to just writing off the data, since all the really important stuff was already rsync-ed onto 3 other computers. But one more utility, what the hell. I fire it up and find it estimates a loooong runtime. Its 3am, time to hit the sack.

I wake up a bit past noon and wander over to the computer. “Scan complete”, along with pretty much all my files intact. INTACT. Woohoo! Bill’s laughing has stopped.

Too bad the good news is tempered by the closing of suprnova and a few other torrent hangouts.

My office computer just got migrated from Office 2k to 2k3. For say 90% of the people here, 2k was already overkill let alone whatever cutting edge features are offered in 2k3. I thought it was rather amusing what the company email noted among the “big improvements”:

Yes, the new prettied up clip art is going to lead to a major spike in productivity. Whoop-di-doo.

As far as I can tell, the only real improvements came with Outlook 2k3, but thats quickly turning into a moot point. After a bit of “network probing” I’ve figured out how to set up Mozilla Mail/Thunderbird to read and send messages from my work mail account. Now they just need to throw in calendar support and I can ditch Outlook completely.

Oh yeah, I got semi-moved into a new cube in a supposedly more secure area. Lower walls, more dense, older people, louder, and harder to get real work done in. Adding insult to injury, my phone number isn’t going to be transferred so all those business cards I have are now obselete.

Yup, work life is great.