Today’s Technical Disaster

Today was a day of managing disasters. My mother and father-in-law came down for a quick visit (they planned to leave before nightfall) for me to put some games on their daughters laptops among other things. I had everything laid out for a total of 30 minutes of work. When I booted up one of the laptops I noticed it only had 2GB of disk space left so I decided to do some pruning of the tem files etc. and clean it up… this turned out to be a big task as most of the information was her documents that she wanted to keep.

I had an extra bay on the laptop and an adaptor for another drive so I decided to add a second drive and transfer all of her stuff to it. This way she would have a system disk and a data disk. About half way through the transfer my son comes into the room and accidentally knocks the laptop off from about 3′. This of course would have been ok except for the writing state that the drive was in. So primary drive dead on an 8 yr old laptop with xp on it.

I worked for about the next three hours trying various levels of recovery until I heard the dreaded knock. Chills went up my spine as I turned and said there is no hope for this drive. She of course was in a panic since I couldn’t tell her if her documents were safely transfered yet. Turns out all of them weren’t.

So now I go to plan B. take the extra drive I had just put in the system and re-install the os… except now the only drive that had the original OS is gone. Dang!

After this I ran one more checkdisk as I scavenged to find an OS disk… any OS and as I was scavenging I found two laptops that I had planned to sell but hadn’t yet… I had totally forgotten about them. So now I was on to Plan C. as I had found a windows 7 disk and assumed that her current laptop couldn’t run I took one of the newer ones up and she was ready to go about 7hrs after I started a 30 minute transfer… sheez.

Also in lue of this I scored an iPhone 3G and had planned on jailbreaking it and giving to them with MAME on it so they could play the games anywhere. What wound up happening is that I now have a 3G phone that sticks on the ipsw restore about 3/4 of the way through. So while all of this laptop trouble is going on I am trying to search forums for a clue of how to bring it back. (this is still unresolved, if you have ideas please comment.)

To make this story even better I’ll add a third layer. While I was dealing with the laptop fiasco and the phone my Mighty Mouse also decides to go all screwy and every time I would touch it Expose would either come or go. So I also had a mighty mouse tore open on my desk.

So my in-laws decided to stay the night and leave in the morning due to the delay and as I write this post I am just now finishing up on that 30 minute job.

Here is to a better tomorrow
David Bates

Monster Jam 2011

Tonight we took Daniel and his cousin Zach to Monster Jam. They both loved it. It was loud, smelled like burnt fuel and had lots of cool Monster Trucks. IronMan was the truck that stole their heart as they both love the IronMan movies. I also loved the fact that about 20 minutes of the show was dedicated to honoring our armed forces and our country.

I plan to add to this post tomorrow with lots of pictures and maybe even a video, if they turned out ok.

Goodnight for now… Daddy is tired

Digital Snow

Above is another creation from Barbara Hullett her original artwork is on the right with my vectorization on the left.

This drawing was inspired by the recent weather events and modern times. The recent weather events are also known as the biggest let down in weather this century. Several counties around the triad called off school in anticipation of Snowmageddon and nothing showed up until well into the evening. Facebook and Twitter were both on fire with scowls of angry parents telling the school board and the weathermen that they had waisted their precious PTO.

I myself even got caught up in the hype staying home Monday and working remotely.

Hope all you stay warm and enjoy the imagery.
David Bates

Birds Falling

A quick note about the artwork
A co-worker of mine Barbara Hullett draws a picture on her dry erase board every couple of weeks for our teams amusement (you may have seen some of her other drawings on my twitpic feed). Sometimes its whimsical, sometimes a play on words or the latest news, but almost always involves a cat. We have all come to appreciate her artwork here. The photo you see above is a vector re-creation of her most recent board “Birds Falling” done by myself.

I was recently shocked when I went through my news-feed to find that thousands of birds were falling out of the sky and thousands of fish near the same town were floating up on-shore. I couldn’t believe that they didn’t immediately issue a warning for the area asking people to stay indoors, or even a “Don’t touch the birds” broadcast. The clean up crews that entered the town wore total protective suits including air filters but left the regular townsfolk to fend for themselves. Almost like a scene directly from “The Crazies” where the whole town become infected because action wasn’t taken to separate the towns people and test them.

The conclusion that the birds died from stress due to fireworks is completely ridiculous. Especially given that fish died as well. I just am baffled how casual this whole situation was dealt with and thought I should jot it down.

Thanks for reading
David Bates