Deep Thoughts
However I came to be here is irrelevant; I am here now.
Odd Stats
Do you ever look at your blog’s statistics and wonder if you accidentally offended people? I do.
Deep Thoughts
The demons we chose to ignore cause the greatest grief.
Aren’t older sisters great!
My husband sense is tingling
I know..it could be that Cathy is bitter over yesterday’s overwhelming lack of specialness. But that’s not it. Something is amiss. Usually this means I am forgetting a commitment. Or there is something important to the Venusian
The Hard Drive Chronicles
I work on a Frankenstein computer. No, that’s not some geeky brand of elite super computer. It is spare parts held together with bailing wire and dust. It is an new piece of hardware fit into an old case with the help of a Dremel and a cutting blade. It is just enough memory to do what I need but not quite enough to do what I want. And it is a 60 gb hard drive that floats between 500 mb and 2 gb of free space.
I finally squirreled away enough from my budget to purchase a new 500 gb (p)ATA hard drive. (Being honest with myself this was less about budget and more about martyrdom. I buy things for the kids before myself.) Additionally, Newegg had a great special on a USB external drive. Since I vowed to free myself from being bound to a single computer, I jumped on the special with plans to install a bootable OS such as Ubuntu and keep my entire development environment on the USB drive. As such, I should be able to work anywhere on just about any machine with enough memory.
The upgrade plan was simple. Make a backup of my workstation to the usb drive, then clone the 60 gb drive to the 500 gb drive and I’d be done. Unfortunately, the 60 gb drive came dead on arrival and had to be RMA’d. I couldn’t wait so I started the cloning process but ran into read errors. So 2 days of drive testing and using different bootable CDs with a variety of partitioning and cloning software turned into 3 days and then it happened. Everything quit working! I powered down and haven’t had the guts to return since. I could have just potentially lost a significant amount of data related to the success (if you want to call it that) of my freelancing career and the support and operation of my family. No, despite my rhetoric about the importance of backups, particularly offsite backups, I do not practice what I preach. The quantity of data I manage long outgrew my ability to create meaningful backups of every bit and byte. Instead I grab what is viewed as essential and make sure it is in a few places. For instance, I drop a couple of dollars each month to make sure Amazon has a copy of all our family photos in addition to the subset of photos that make it up to Flickr. I am not prepared to lose entire hard drives.
Next immediate plan of action: Determine damage-Test components individually. If neither drive works by itself, assume the IDE controller fried and test in another machine. If I can show the drives are both good and pass a chkdsk, then I have one more big gun of a partitioning program and an equally big gun of a cloning program that I have not tried. I expect them to be successful and this debacle to be over. Oh..but I have to watch Warehouse 13 first!
Update: My 60 gb drive has been confirmed functional with data. My current suspicion is that the primary ide controller has failed. This could be a good excuse to buy a new computer 🙂
Update: 60 gb drive okay but no longer boots. IDE controller is fine. 500 gb drive approved for RMA. Next step, clone the 60 gb drive to some backup space then tinker with the master boot record to see if I can get the drive booting again.
My child’s safety is more important than your schedule
Update 31 Aug 2009: Mr. Roy Mullins contacted me today to say the stop will be returned to Aspen Drive and Huntington Road. My many thanks to Mr. Roy Mullins, Knox County Schools, and the Transportation Department!
Dear Knox County Schools,
Today is my anniversary. The present that you gave me is a rejection letter with a line of bull regarding my child’s bus stop. See, 8 years ago you and I spent 3 years establishing a new bus stop for the elementary students that gets them safely away from S Northshore Drive and adds no time to your route. I’ll grant you an added 30 seconds to 2 minutes depending on traffic. For 5 years the bus route was run without problem safely within our neighborhood on a road parallel to S Northshore. Now you’d have my children stand on the edge of a 40 mph road with a blind corner and a blind hill. Already once this first week of school, I had to move a child from the left side of the road where he was standing in the path that cars use to whip from 40 mph down to the 25 mph neighborhood road. The corner is blind with overgrown bushes and had a car turned in the child would have been dead long before the driver saw him. Is that what will have to happen for you to see this stop as dangerous? Will a child have to die? You also seem to have a stop prior to ours. I am not yet sure how that is possible because anything before us is supposed to be in the parent responsibility zone which means all the other children in our neighborhood should now be granted busing. It’s a shame that you and I both have to put resources into this needless battle (a 2nd time) when our time could be spent doing something productive for our school system.
Sincerely,
Doug McCaughan
ps. You know. I really had hoped that KCS had reached a point of wanting to work together to improve our education system instead of playing games and fighting.
(you’ll have my official letter soon)
Happy Anniversary Cathy!
Cathy and I were married at Gatlinburg’s Ye Ol’ Tyme Photo Boothe and its been one grand adventure since then!
Saturday I was making grandiose plans to make grandiose plans for today. I remembered our wedding anniversary! This morning I received an email from a great friend wishing me a happy anniversary. She’d remembered; I’d forgotten! Today is Tuesday which means we stick to the family tradition of Domino’s Two-fer Tuesday so for our bronze anniversary we are having BBQ chicken pizza.
I cannot put into words how much I love Cathy! She moves me in so many ways. She has brought so much happiness into my life!
Cathy I love you! Happy Anniversary! I look forward to many more!
Please don’t kill me
Drivers, commit to your decisions and the roads will be safer. In the turn lane? Turn!
Mobile post sent by djuggler using Utterli. Replies. mp3
Doug’s Mantras
Today I am calm.
From the mouths of babes
Why fathers should skip their daughter’s teen years.
Me: "How are you doing on lunch money?"
Sarah, 16 years old, looks at me like I just asked the craziest question ever: "I dunno."
Me: "You don’t know how much money is in your account?"
Sarah: "Well no. There should be a few days."
Me: "Today, when you buy lunch, could you check on your balance please?"
Sarah, looking very put out: "I guess."
From the mouths of babes
Student: Am I forever changed?
Master: With great consistency.
It’s my reality
Everyday I come a little bit more to terms with the fact that I’m alone and the rest of you are simply constructs of my imagination. I’m sure this creates some very large problems for each of you on a quantum level but I cannot be held accountable for that since you don’t exist. That is all.
What’s that smell?
Dear Deodorant Companies, please quit watering down your formulas to try to sell us on your higher price clinical brands. Your watering down habit has found itself into the clinical brands or your formulas just don’t work. I have a household full of teenagers right now. I can attest that all of you, Gillette, Axe, Secret, Right Guard, etc. stink! (actually I think its the teens that smell)
That’s enough of a rant. I just had to clear the air. Thx.
