the pod bay door

.: About three weeks ago I bought a Maxtor 320GB external drive. Everything was going fine until I linked it to my desktop, a 2002 Dell Dimension 4400. The Dell froze and wouldn’t reboot. A few days later, the Dell was at David’s house (the drummer in HDNB), where its hard drive was made a slave drive, and one of David’s drive temporarily became the computer’s C drive. We copied the contents of my drive to the Maxtor, which took a few days, as the Dell’s USB ports are 1.1. When this task finished, the Dell’s original hard drive was reformatted, and I took the computer home, reloaded XP and Office, and then connected the Maxtor to copy the files back to the C drive. Except that the Dell was telling me that the Maxtor wasn’t formatted. I connected the Maxtor to my laptop with the same results.

So I thought, now what? I surfed the Maxtor site, and learned that there were programs I could use to recover the data on the Maxtor, but of course at a cost. I chose this program, which ran for four days but recovered over 70,000 files from the Maxtor, paid for the licence (which allowed me to copy the files back to the C drive), and finished everything tonight. Lesson learned: back up your important data.

.: Christmas is impending. I’ve been off work since 16 December 2006, and have spent a lot of time resting and laying low. I saw three movies this week: Apocalypto, Casino Royale, and Little Miss Sunshine. I’m behind preparing my Christmas cards, and hope to finish a few more tomorrow. I’ve started the daunting task of cleaning my house, beginning with the basement. I filled six blue and six green bags for garbage pickup this morning, plus two blue bags of shredded paper products. I tossed about fifteen large cardboard boxes into the local recycling bins, and donated five boxes of books to the University of Alberta Libraries this morning (where, coincidentally, I work). I bought two new Uniden cordless phones to replace the aging Uniden phone I’ve had since the mid-90s. In between the foregoing I’ve been finishing last minute Christmas shopping.

.: I was saddened to learn last week that my Little Brother is moving away from Edmonton. I am an In-School Mentor with Big Brothers Big Sisters in Edmonton, and my Little Bro, JG, is leaving town. In-School Mentors visit their Littles once a week at their schools, and spend about 45-60 minutes with them once a week. I’ve worked with J for about 18 months, and recently he was teaching me how to play chess. I’ll miss him, but wish him well; he’s a great kid.

.: It hasn’t taken the corporate world long to take advantage of YouTube. NBC, for example, is uploading videos of its shows (or sections thereof) within minutes of a show’s finish. Last Saturday, NBC uploaded the uncensored version of a video featuring guest host Justin Timberlake and cast member Andy Samberg soon after the show ended. The music video is crude but funny – Timberlake plays the boy band schtick to the nines! When the YT video ended, links to a number of other NBC videos appeared, including this one, which includes one brilliantly hilarious scene (extreme sports), and is about an NBC-sponsored site called It’s Your Show. Create an original video (with original music if need be), use the supplied toolkit if applicable, upload the video into an existing category on the site, or create your own category therein. Sounds like fun, if you have enough free time to work on such things.