Rollercoaster ride from hell.

Computers suck.  We rely on them heavily, and then they just break down, out of nowhere their hard drive crashes and we lose everything we’ve got.

Then we became smart enough to keep a backup of our important stuff.  Now we’re safe, if either goes bad, we’ll still have one copy of our information.

Until two hard drives go belly up within a week and a half of each other.  Which, you all probably know, happened to me this month.

Well, yesterday I got the call from the Geek Squad™ that they were done retrieving the information off my original backup drive.  I went down there to pick it up and find out how things went.

They told me that they were able to save some 590GB of the 620+GB that was on there.  The disk went down in flames before they could get the rest.  I headed home fearing the worst, that the missing 40GB was the REALLY important stuff.

I got home, plugged the new 3TB hard drive into the new computer and waited for it to install the driver.  Then I started going through the stuff they had saved.  I was looking for a folder named “MyEverything”, which had all my financial information and all the information for the payroll I do.  It was there, completely intact.  All I lost were pictures, which have their very own hard drive which was not a part of the crash of 2012.

So, all I ended up losing was the stuff I did between the backup hard drive crash and the computer crash.  The week that I printed the W-2 forms and their first payroll of the year.  I’m going to have to recreate the end of the year stuff and re input all the employee data, which will take a lot of my weekend but at least all is not completely lost.

With the original photo hard drive, the first new backup drive and the second one I purchased to have the info transferred onto, I’m now going to have three (3) backups of my vital information.  And I set up my backing-up program to automatically back up everything every day, in the wee hours of the morn.

Now the big question is: Can four hard drives crash simultaneously?  Because I’m not going to wait a week next time to go out and get a replacement for a bad hard drive.  No way.

Computer Based Testing Uber Alles

What a day! We had a test run of the new Computer Based CRT (end of year) Testing today, and it was an incredibly successful failure. The State changed companies this year, switching to a completely online testing system. Our district person over testing foresaw problems with having the entire state attempting to access the same site at the same time, and talked the State into having a state-wide test of the system. So, today at 9:30 in the morning, every school in the state was supposed to do a test run of the system. Don't know if everyone was on or not, but either way the system crashed. I couldn't even get the kids through the first part of the first test. Since we had expected problems, I had prepped the students for it, and they were incredibly good during the whole thing. After I explained to them that even I was getting kicked out of the system and that they couldn't do anything anyway until I was back in, they just talked for the 20 minutes I was fighting my own login. As I said in the report below, if this had been during the real test, right now instead of writing this very post I'd be up in a padded room wearing a wrap-around jacket.

Here's my entry on the report of the system:

We had problems from the very beginning. I had a couple student's who were not allowed to put in the whole user name - it cut them off at 7 characters.

One recurring error we got was a box with "Network Error" in red. I got:

1@9:35, 5@9:55 and 2@10:05.

I had students kicked out: 2@9:55 and 2@10:00.

Between about 9:40 and 9:55, I didn't log any problems because the proctor (me) kept getting kicked off the system. I got stuck in a loop where the error "Failure (901) connecting to website" would come up, it would give me the option "click to return to login" and then lock up. I'd close the browser and start all over again, just to get the same error. I went through 4 cycles before it logged in correctly - then the student issues started again.

I gave up when, at 10:10 half the class was having trouble even getting the CRT login to work and the 14 students who had it working all at once got this error "Your proctor has stopped the test due to network errors."

The only other thing I can add is that I'm glad this was only a trial run - if it had been the real thing I would have had a stroke. Good thing someone thought of trying this before the real thing - she deserves the next week off.

More computer issues. *FIXED, YES!*

Ok, below is the post I started, until I got a brainstorm.  Yes, it happens to me a lot, and once in a while it's even useful.  I just looked into the new data folder, picked out a name of one of the files and did a search for it.  First try, all I came up with was the new files.  But there was an option on the advanced search that would search non-indexed folders, although it warned this may take longer.  So, I figured since I couldn't find the folder the help file said should exist, maybe it was one of these 'non-indexed' folders.  Whoa - there it was.  So, I just right-clicked, chose 'open location' and copied the folders over to the new, backed up location.  And when I opened up Thunderbird again, there they were, all my lost emails.  WHEW!

If you ever change the path of any data file, be sure to write down the old path before you do.  On my old computer I used Microsoft Outlook to access my myriad of email addresses, but with the new computer I got the watered down version of Office 2007 - no Outlook.  So, I installed Mozilla Thunderbird, a free Outlook type email program.  I've know a lot of people who have used it, and they all liked it, and so far I've had no problems with it.  Well, except for one.  I wanted to change the data file to a folder that I have automatically backed up - trying to learn from past mistakes.  It all worked fine and dandy, except it didn't move over all the old data - I lost all my old emails.  So I tried to set it back to the default, and even tried to find the old data file so I could move it to the new location.  Yeah, uh, not so much.  It didn't exist where the help file told me it should.

One point twenty one gigawatts?

I left the house at 11:00 this morning to buy my new computer. It's now 10:00 in the evening. The computer is running, and I have it all networked and the old drives from the dead computer accessable, but still I'm not done. It's going to have to wait for another day. Why don't I have it done, you may ask, since I just said I have everything working? Well, I figured I didn't want another disaster like this last one, so I bought a 1 terrabyte networking harddrive. Actually I bought two. The first one I got all hooked up and was in the middle of installing the software when it informed me that it would work with Windows XP or the 32 bit version of Vista, but not the 64 bit version of Vista. And guess which version I ended up with? Give yourself a $20 bill! I had a couple good leads on a good XP machine (thank you my California friend) but I ended up just going for the Vista. Anyway, I go back to Best Buy with the first server and trade it in for another one that is supposed to work with the 64 bit Vista. Yeah, it does. Sort of. Everything installed right, but you have to jump through about 1,236.97 hoops to get it to work, and somewhere I messed up. This took the bulk of the 11 hours. So, at 9:30 this evening I gave up, packed the thing up and plan on returning it. Now, I haven't given up on the terrabyte harddrive, I'm just going to get an external USB version and give up on the server aspect. I'll still be able to access it from all the computers on my little home network, but I won't have web based access. I was kind of looking forward to that, being able to get to my files from anywhere. But, alas, it's not worth the ulcer I'm working on.

So there it is, I'm back in business, on the net and blogging again. And so far, other than the server issue I gave up on, Vista hasn't been too bad to me. (knock, knock).

Oh, and by the way, the computer I use for my web site got a lot faster when I quadrupled the RAM with pieces of the dead computer. 256 MB bad, 1 Gig good!

Update : still no computer

Well, I didn't have to take down the rest of the site, I tried hooking up the old harddrive in the web site computer, and it didn't work.  when I was going through it looking for the data for payroll, I discovered that something had happened to the operating system.  It wasn't there.  My "Windows" folder is empty.  Niiiice.  I also couldn't locate the data for payroll, so I had to do it all by hand.  That part was actually not to bad, but getting the printer to work on this computer was, well, let's just say - a lot of fun.  See, the CD drive on here is broken, which is why I've used it as the server instead of as a computer, so I couldn't install the printer driver from the enclosed CD.  Any why, oh why, does the automatic installation always ask you if you want it to search the internet for the driver, yet is NEVER able to find it?  Yeah, that's a useful little tool.  So I went to Panasonic's website to download the driver myself and found one of the most un-user friendly sites I've ever seen.  If it was a car it would be a 1972 AMC Gremlin.  It took me 45 minutes and several ulcers to actually find the driver and get it downloaded.  But it finally came through, payroll is done and I've got a week and a half to get a new computer and a payroll program for it.  So right now I'm working on a computer with no CD drive, low memory, old processor that is postitioned in a way that it is awkward to work on.  Ok, I'm done complaining.

Things could be worse.  On the way up to class today we stopped off at Chili's for dinner and saw a couple cop cars, fire engine and ambulance at the Staples right next door.  At least I'm not the owner of the Buick that was parked in the front door of that store.  Completely inside, the back bumper was right where the door used to be.  And fortunately the Trax train up by the U that got derailed and was kinda sideways on the track was all cleaned up by the time we got done with dinner.  Of course the friend I ride to class with had the heels on her boots go all skewampus and had to throw them away and walk to Trax in her socks.  We just barely missed the Sandy train at the Galivan center, and I gave her one of my shoes to stand on, so there we were each perched on one foot, leaning up against one another.  A guy, who let's say had a little bit to drink, started talking to us and after a bit mistook our holding each other up for something more carnal, apologized (in a somewhat crude way) for interrupting and walked away.  But, again, at least it wasn't my Buick parked inside the Staples.

And I did get a good laugh today.  The teacher next to me had a substitute and she had to kick a couple of freshmen into my classroom.  I have a small class with all seniors and juniors in it, so it wasn't a problem.  The 9th graders this year are a pretty rowdy group overall, and I guess that the reputation of these freshmen were well known; at one point one of the juniors said "I hope puberty hits these 9th graders before I have to."  Yeah, somedays I like teaching high school.

Technical Difficulties.

Tried buying a PC that still runs on Windows XP lately? Not so easy. Vista has taken over, which would be all fine and dandy, except a lot of XP programs will not work on Vista. So I tried to get a new computer at Best Buy with XP. They had only one, and lo and behold, they were sold out of them. I'm going to have to order it special order and who knows when it will get here. The bad news is that I have stuff to do on my old computer, so I'm going to have to gut the computer I'm using and try to get the other hard drive to work here. And that means that http://www.srossi.net/ is going to be down for a while.

The good news is that since http://www.srossi.net/ is a blend of my own website and a blog, you will still be able to get to the important stuff. You will still be able to access:

• all my posts since April of 2007
• all my important links, including
• the link to srossi e-mail.

so, if you generally access my site from http://www.srossi.net/, you will need to bookmark this link instead:

http://ladunata.blogspot.com/

you will still be able to access your srossi.net email through here.

http://www.srossi.net/ will be going offline sometime in the evening on Tuesday, December 2, 2008.

see ya around and I'll keep you updated.

Down to the wire at the "U", payroll due, lesson plans needed and...

KABOOM!

...my computer at home froze up, fried and in at least 3.14159 other distinct ways died. Which means that my assignment didn't get turned in and the employees at Free Wheeler are going to have to wait a couple days to get paid (the owner is going to front them any money they absolutely need before I can get the checks done, so nobody's going to starve or get evicted).

It also means that, since I can only blog when I'm in class at the U (blogs blocked at work) that although I'll be able to post your comments, I probably won't take the time right now to respond to them. Sorry. I do plan to go out and get a new computer tomorrow, but I'll still have to set it up and get caught up on payroll and classwork before I get to catch up on blogging.