the ryan king

Fallujah in Pictures– courtesy of Greg

An interersing article.

The Denver post has anan interesting article about how Bush’s policies are really that supportive of the Conservative Christian agenda. I have to agree. Bush is quite moderate in many ways and it seems that many times its his proponents (Dobson, et al) who bring up these “moral issues.” For those who care about such things, give it up– Bush isn’t going to to anything more than Kerry would have to reduce the number of abortions, prevent embryonic stem cell research or restrict gay rights. You got used.

As mentioned in a previous post, my iBook is dead. However, I wanted to get the harddrive out and put it in an external enclosure, so I did a little autopsy. You can view some pics of the dead iBook at Flickr. After taking the whole iBook apart (with no plans of reassembly), I looked up prices for the various parts on eBay. It turns out that even the heat shields are worth $10-$20. That amazes me. It looks like I’ll be able to make a couple hundred dollars selling the parts.

So to the point of this post, eventually I got he harddrive in an enclosure and tried it out. It didn’t work. It would cost at least $1000 to get the data off of it and I don’t have a full backup from the last 5 months.

What’s the moral of the story? Don’t trust hard drives. Ever. Any of them. In fact, don’t trust any media. Ever. Any of them.

I’m looking for a new backup strategy, especially for my photos (that’s the majority of what I lost). I think I’m going to start using Flickr. It will allow me to share and backup my photos at once.

I really has been one of the roughest weeks (actually 2 weeks) of my life. Here’s the bad things that happend:

31 Oct – Car wreck – really just a fender-bender, but still stressful…oh, and it was my fault -1

2 Nov – Dropped my laptop, which happens to be my primary computer -1

3-4 Nov – Computer worked fine, even though the case was bent up +1

5 Nov – computer completely stopped working, took it to the look Mac repair guy -0

8 Nov – Mac repair guy finally came to the conclusion that repairing the computer would not be worth the money it would cost (screen was broken)-1

10 Nov – buy new PowerBook. This should be a very happy day, but it isn’t. I should be ecstatic, but I’m really stressed out, because I haven’t been able to get much work done for about 5 days. -1

10 Nov – later that evening…. I’m working on setting up my new laptop and a serious error occurs. Apple’s Software Update crashes in the midst of an OS update, leaving my computer in an unusable state. Of course, I’m at work and don’t have an OS install CD with me, so I can’t do anything until the next day.-1

11 Nov – pull hard drive out of old laptop and put it in an external enclosure. It doesn’t work. It’s not worth paying over $1000 to get the data off it. -1

12 Nov – computer’s finally setup to do some work +1

12 Nov – now I actually have to work, instead of just reading blogs and listening to podcasts all day -1

Sum: -7

More on the new computer later