One of my driving pet peeves…

Got this on facebook:

Especially when it’s on the freeway, by the off ramp and the schmuck is blocking the flow of traffic.

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.

Innocence still exists.

I got this when I taught at the high school, the PTA gave them out to all the teachers.  It still sits on my desk.

Today after school four seventh graders were hanging out in my room waiting for their ride.  One of them saw the rock and said “That’s cool, it says ‘You Rock’ on that rock.”

Then he saw this, (which I got for being a new member of the faculty at the school I’m at now)

and asked “Does it say ‘You Bone” on the bone?”

Now, my first thought was that it was intentional.  I looked up at him, preparing to say something about inappropriate comments in my classroom.  Not even a smirk, not even a twitch at the corner of his mouth. And his three friends who were close by didn’t even flinch.

Now, at this point it took every ounce of my self control to keep from breaking out in laughter as I picked up the bone and pointed out to him that it just said “Welcome..”, and the conversation continued like no double entendre was uttered.

What’re the odds.

About a week ago my backup hard drive went on the fritz.  Wasn’t working, so I couldn’t keep backing things up.

Yesterday, as I was starting to back things up on my brand new backup hard drive, my computer died.  Completely fried the hard drive.  Great.  Lost. Everything.  Well, except for my pictures, which fortunately were backed up on a third hard drive.

I took the computer down to Best Buy and talked to the Geek Squad.  He checked it’s hard drive and gave me the bad news, completely kaput.   I asked him if there was any way to get the information off of it and he told me that it was still possible, as bad as it was, but that it would entail sending it off to somewhere, that it would have to be completely disassembled in a controlled environment.  Then they might be able to get at the info.  Cost?  $2,100, or more.  (Blood pressure spike).

So I went home, got the old back up drive and brought that down.  With my heart pumping at a million beats a second I waited five minutes for him to check it.   First good news of the weekend – he could get at most, if not all, of the information on that one.  (Blood pressure returns to normal).  Not the $2,100, but I did have to shell out $200 for a new 3TB hard drive and the $99 recovery fee.  So with the new 2TB back up drive I already have and the one I bought for the transfer, I’m going to see if 3 copies of everything will be sufficient.

Unfortunately, the information is a week old.  A week which included year-end files for the pizza place’s payroll, their first payroll of the new year, and some work I did on book covers for my writer friend, Lisa Shafer.  (Sorry Lisa, we’re going to have to start over again, though I will still have the files I had when you came over this weekend).

And then I had to spend another $700 for a new computer.  It is a lot faster than that 5 year old one I had, but I still had to spend a bunch of time re-installing programs, and I’m not even done yet.  Bleah.  Oh, and it does have the hookups for dual monitors, which you can see in the picture.  As I write this, it’s in the process of backing up my photos, and all the new stuff on this computer.

Life – sometimes it’s the tasty fruit, sometimes it’s the pits.

How about some more After Dark photos?

I took these one night as they were moving a pre-fab bridge into place where I-80 crosses 7th East.

This first one is in Fairmont Park.  That’s me and my evil-twin brother.  Or maybe just a 30 second shutter shot where I switched places half way through.

This bridge was already in place, where I-80 crosses Highland Drive.  As you can see, they weren’t quite done with the underneath work.

Just north of the freeway is a Utah State Liquor Store.  The only alcohol you can buy at a grocery store in Utah is beer, and 3.2% alcohol beer at that.  All other bottled alcohol must be bought at a State owned and run liquor store, and that includes wine-coolers (alca-pop as they call it).

Looking north on Highland Drive, from right next to the Liquor Store.

The bridge at 700 East being lowered into place.  It was build where the off ramp was, while traffic still continued on the freeway, and then moved into place in one day.

I’d hate to be driving I-80 west and end up on that bridge.

The next three pictures are the exact same shot, just with different shutter speeds.  They were taken facing north on 7th East, facing the opposite direction from where I took the pictures of the bridge being lowered.

And if you are interested in joining in, click on the banner below.