Archives: August 2011

The Wife’s Desktop Melts Down

by James Martini
Categories: family
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Published on: August 11, 2011

After an unrelenting, record breaking succession of 100+ degree days we finally got some rain and a little thunder and lightning to go with it. My yard is no longer threatening to spontaneously combust but the gods of rain exacted their price: my wife’s desktop computer.

The lightshow started after we’d already gone to bed and neither of us thougth to shut down and unplug all the computers. Apparently hers was still awake and doing some software update when we’re guessing a power spike scrambled the hard drive like my morning eggs. It refused to boot and diagnostics mentioned some vague error regarding the hard disk.

Unfortunately, my wife is the archiver of all the digital photos and video and not all of it had been backed to an external drive. If we don’t get the disk up and running we’ll have lost a significant amount of the summer’s photos not to mention the other documents that were not backed up to the external drive.

She’s spent a chunk of the evening attempting to get the recovery CDs to get her to a prompt from which we can chkdsk the filesystem but recovery CDs are apparently a sick joke and do not appear to be independantly bootable. I was able to boot to linux and confirm that the disk is working but couldn’t mount the data filesystem as NTFS has an heroed.

Next steps:

  1. Attempt to boot using my Win7 DVD to get a recovery shell
  2. Failing that, I’m pulling the drive out, mounting it in my desktop to try and chkdsk it from there.
  3. UPS with power conditioning. Surge suppressors are like thin gauze to the power fluctuations rampaging through what is laughingly called a power grid here in NW AR.
  4. NAS or a RAID 5 fileserver for backups. I’m thinking about putting a rack in my office closet to host a reasonably robust file server and router/proxy to keep Emily off 4chan.

Bridging the gulf with EVE

by James Martini
Categories: family, gaming
Tags: , , ,
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Published on: August 10, 2011

I never talk to my brother which a lot of people find strange because we’re twins. I don’t really know what it is but  it never occurs to me to pick up the phone and call him. It works the same for him. No big deal really. I love him and sometimes think about him but we never pick up the phone.

EVE OnlineSo one afternoon I posted a random error message from EVE online to my facebook page: insufficient power. About an hour later my brother responded with another warning from EVE online: I cannot set a waypoint to the same location twice. We’d been playing the same online game for years.

A few days later I logged into EVE and had an email from my brother so I added him to my watch list. A couple days after that we happened to be online at the same time and started chatting. Mostly a little catching up but he recommended that I look into joining his corp.

A few days after that I’d applied to and been accepted to his corp. Since then I’ve had more communication with my twin than I’ve probably had in the last five years combined. I know what he’s up to with his college and internship, how things are going with his kids and generally have regular conversations with him via corp chat and our personal channel. I’ll probably get him a headset with a mic for christmas so we can actually talk to each other.

After decades of only rarely speaking I now have frequent chats with Scott and he’s even on board for my guild/social experiment idea in Star Wars: The Old Republic when it launches.

«page 2 of 2
/emote
  1. monkeyhousezen - Free copy of Diablo 3!!! I'll be talking like Deckard Cain in no time.
  2. monkeyhousezen - Last night I noticed one of the mission NPCs in #swtor sounded like Morgan Freeman. Tittysprinkles.
  3. monkeyhousezen - I didn't realize I was a #gameofthrones fan until I found myself whistling the theme while doing the dishes. Who knew?
  4. monkeyhousezen - Just created my #swtor guild (Luminous Beings) and feel a little like the Merovingian: very well, let us see where this goes.
  5. monkeyhousezen - @realdarthhater What would I add to #swtor at release? Color matching gear to the chest piece. I hate wearing the clown suit.

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