Pictures, Senility, and a battle for my harddrive's soul...

Quote of the Day: Work is for losers.  A winner says "that's on my list" and never commits to a deadline. -Dilbert

Picture Catch-Up Time...

Picture of the Day #30: This plant started with one open flower.

Picture of the Day #31: The next day, there were two open flowers!

Picture of the Day #32: And on the third day, there were three!!!

Picture of the Day #33: Morpheus has taken to ground.  Usually he likes to lay at the highest possible point in the room but lately he's been laying on the ground.  Often in places that he blends so I don't even see him half the time.  This time he was lying with his head on Dakota's bed like it was a pillow, which cracked me up.

Picture of the Day #34: Cucumber plant seems to be doing ok.

Picture of the Day #35: Coolest baby EVER and also our number one softball fan!

Picture of the Day #36: My first Jalapeno!  I dare those evil rabbits to nibble on this!

Picture of the Day #37: The toad I spent 20 minutes chasing around the garage, while it was still in the garage. 

Picture of the Day #38: Triumph!

Picture of the Day #39:  Apparently, I am growing a mushroom garden.  There are a lot of mushrooms cropping up all over the place in the spots that I put the soil mixture I bought by the yard.  I'm hoping that's a good thing.

     
Memories of...nothing...

I'm a bit concerned at the moment.  I'm concerned that I have absolutely ZERO recollection of my 7th grade year.  In the course of conversation about a saved bird, it was told that I had to dissect a worm all by myself because my lab partner, Kerri, was adverse to the idea of murdering a non-arthropod invertebrate animal.  Ok, I'm not sure that at 12 the idea of murdering the worm was what was bothersome to her.  It was more the ick factor.  Fortunately, my morbid (but not sociopathic) interest in the inner working of things probably started at an early age, so I was probably a good lab partner for that sort of thing.  The problem is I don't remember.  Not just that, I don't remember 7th grade at all.  I cannot bring to mind a single moment of that entire year.  I remember stuff from 6th grade (that was a bad year with my dad having the cancer) and I very clearly remember things from 8th grade.  But the entire year I was 12 is a complete blank.  It's so weird.  Was that the year my mom decided to join the Air Force and the house was put up for sale and we were supposed to move to Texas, but at the last minute she changed her mind and we stayed?  I thought that was 8th grade, but I'm not sure now.  I can't remember a single teacher I had in the 7th grade, nor any activities or vacations or anything.  I'll have to ask my brother.  Maybe he'll know something.  Does anyone have any stories for me from 7th grade? 

How My Hard Drive Destroyed My Soul...An Essay by Jennifer daSilva....

It was a Sunday when it happened. A cloudy unspectacular day, if memory serves.  I had just returned from the Apple store, a place I would not normally have ventured.  In this case, there was a drowned iPod and a very sad 14-year old boy who had learned the very hard life lesson that iPods do not know how to swim (not even with swimmies), nor are they particularly water proof.  So, after an appointment was made, I drove to the scary fancy mall and almost drank some delicious Apple kool-aid after the Genius replace the iPod for FREE. Thank you, Warrenty and also Genius. (I did not drink the Kool-Aid, though, when I realized that all the cool iPad covers were for the iPad2 and that my 1-year-old iPad was completely out of fashion.  Stupid technology moving fast.) 

This event had got me to thinking that I should really take a look to what I had stored on my external harddrive and determine what I needed to back up soon.  I also watched to test the download and upload speeds I could get when running uTorrent via ethernet cable vs the wifis. True Story: I'm a geek.  I think most of you know that already.  So, it shouldn't be surprising that I would want to spend an afternoon playing with my hard drive and testing download speeds.  It's was cloudy out and I didn't feel like swimming.  So, I settled in at the little table we have in the upstairs living room, looking forward to my geekfest while the soft sounds of giggling minions and battle came from the television where G was playing Overlord 2 on the Playstation.

I boot up my computer (Windows 7, I sort of heart you. Only when I don't hate you. But mostly I heart you because you are not XP).  I plug in the USB to connect my terabyte drive (GBs are for wussies) and wait for Windows to recognize the drive.  I wait.  I wait some more. I see a rather strange message pop up that a driver is being installed. Um, this is Windows 7.  No driver should need to be installed.  It was just working 10 minutes ago when I unplugged it from the wall in the bedroom.  I don't understand. I hear "whir whir whir...click click....whir..." and I realized that things were not ok.  I go to Device Manager.  The drive is listed, but the file system is not getting loaded.  And that's when I said "oh fuck".  File system not loading + wierd noises coming from the drive = bad things are happening.

I won't go into the excruciating details...well, not too much.  Initially, being in a state of complete denial and hoping that the issue was just a corrupted file system, which I can recover from,  I tried various file recovery programs but Windows needs to at least be able to access the file system to recover files that are corrupted. See also: Jenn's hopes begin fading.  That was Sunday.  I didn't want to panic quite yet, plus we had the minions and they sort of require more attention then I can give when I'm in full on "Save the Hard Drive" mode.  Monday, I did some research and eventually came to the conclusion that I would need to copy an image of the entire hard drive, bit by bit to a new hard drive (which Boyfriend brought home for me and this one is TWO terabytes!!).  DDRescue might be the droids that I am looking for, so I burnt me an Ubuntu boot up disk, wrote down some linux commands and got started.  After removing the drive from the case (seriously, could they make that any harder?), I fiddled had to fiddle with the connections a bit to get Ubuntu to recognize the drive.  But finally, there is was, waiting to take an excruciatingly long time to image.  I had partitioned the new drive into two drives so that I could make the disk image go on one partition and then later recover it on the other partition.  Unfortunately, the partitions where not big enough and I could not run ddrescue with a log file.  So i let it run for 14 hours, into Tuesday.  The numbers didn't look right.  Something was not right.  So, Wed, I stopped it, un-partitioned the new drive so I could have a log file, figuring if I could just get the image to it, I'd get another one to recover to.  It's 2011 and 2 TB drives are less than $100 (I find that INCREDIBLE.  I remember when I got excited because they actually made 1TB drives that got sold in like OfficeMax and then how excited I got when they were only like $150 and now you can get 2TB for under $100!!!).  So, I tried setting everything back up and rerunning ddrescue only this time it would start and finish immediately with zero values for everything which is the equivalent to nothing happening.  I tried every possible option all to no avail.  Now I am left soulless.

I will make one final attempt tonight, using a Windows boot disk and the Recovery Console.  I really don't want to lose everything on that drive, but most of it just downloaded stuff, so I suppose I'll survive.  I don't think I stored any pictures on it or anything that I don't also have somewhere else.  It's just aggrevating.

And now I have a meeting to attend. Bleh.

Jenn - I am a geek, it's true...

It's possible that I've run out of interesting things to say...

Quote of the Day: Feedback is a business term which refers to the joy of criticizing other people's work. This is one of the few genuine pleasures of the job, and you should milk it for all it's worth. - Dilbert

Pictures of the Day...

I have so many days to catch up on. I'm realizing that I either live a very boring life or I'm lazy about taking pictures.  I'm guessing it's both...

Picture of the Day #24: Brian at the German Bakery.  He's a wild and Crazy guy!

Picture of the Day #25: The first year of cherries on the cherry tree

Picture of the Day #26: The first flower on my first tomato plant which will hopefully become my first tomato!

Picture of the Day #27: Brian built me two more boxes.  The one of the left is mostly different types of tomato plants (i love tomatoes!) and the one on the right has asparagus and broccoli and peppers.

Picture of the Day #28:  This is what my house looks like from the front now.  The River Birch needs to grow!

Picture of the Day #29: This is what the house looks like right now from the end of the driveway...I know, I'm getting lazy with the pictures. I'll have to see if the minions will pose for some this weekend.

My obsession...well, for now....

I am in love with audio books.  I've found that I miss reading but not enough that I want to give up my new love, Drop7 (which is available on Android/iPad). Audio books allow me to enjoy both activities at the same time.  In the past few months, I have listened to the following:

A. Harry Potter Series (I've read them all but listening to them is AWESOME!!!)

1. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

2. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

3. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

4. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

5. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

6. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince

7. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (This one won a Grammy and the reader earned a world record for the number of voices he did)

B. David Eddings Books (My all time favorite fantasy author. I've actually read all these books at least 5 times each and still listening to them was awesome)

The Belgariad

1. Pawn of Prophecy

2. Queen of Sorcery

3. Magician's Gambit

4. Castle of Wizardry

5. Enchanters End Game

The Mallorean (same characters as The Belgariad)

1. Guardians of the West

2. King of the Murgos

3. Demon Lord of Karanda

4. Sorceress of Darshiva

5. The Seeress of Kell

6. Belgarath the Sorcerer

7. Polgara the Sorceress

The Elenium

1. The Diamond Throne

2. The Ruby Knight

3. The Sapphire Rose

The Tamuli (same characters as The Elenium)

1. Domes of Fire

2. The Shining Ones

3. The Hidden City

C. Ender's Game

D. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy (The are recorded with a FULL CAST which make them even more entertaining!)

1. The Golden Compass

2. The Subtle Knife

3. The Amber Spyglass


I was able to get a bunch of these from the library which was pretty cool. I'm not sure what I will listen to next.  The Philip Pullman books have been so entertaining because of all the voices.  I suppose I should listen to a grown-up book at some point, but they bore me.


Jenn - DOTS are not an appropriate breakfast food, but they sure are tasty!

Impossible just means it hasn't been figured out yet...

Quote of the day: "The best way to avoid criticism is to establish a reputation for being irrational and belligerent at the slightest excuse." - Dilbert

I'm sick of hearing "that's impossible"...

How is it that there is anyone that still thinks that there are impossibilities in the world? Like when I say "it's not unreasonable to think that the laws of physics will one be proven to be incorrect", people get all "It's a law! It's been proven! It's impossible that anything will change that.".  Um, right, because as humans we obviously have figured out all there is to know about everything and there is no way that anything new will ever come to light or that we could be wrong. (And responding with "Your face is impossible!" doesn't get people to take you seriously, FYI). Good thing you weren't around when sailors decided to chance sailing off the edge of the earth when they thought it was flat or else we'd all still be thinking in 2 dimensions...

The thing is that, in my mind, anything is possible, even if it does not seem to be so at the time of the discussion.  Not having the knowledge about something doesn't mean it can't ever be done.  The thing that spurred this was a discussion about aliens.  I believe that there are other being out in the universe and that it's not unreasonable to believe that they could have the ability to do things and travel much further than we earth folk currently can. I'm not saying that all the stories of alien abduction and such are entirely believable, but I also don't think it's entirely impossible. Of course, I got the "it's impossible to travel those distances". Since earth folk haven't figured it out, that must mean that no other beings in all the uncharted universe could possibly have figured that out. I apologize to the entire human race and mean no disrespect, but I don't actually believe that we know everything there is to know about everything ever. I'm basing that on the fact that as soon as I get the newest, most high tech cell phone in a couple of months (Motorola Bionic!!!), five minutes later it will become outdated technology.  So unless there is some evil cell phone conspiracy, one in which all cell phone technology that will ever exist has already been discovered and they are just doling it out in small bits to keep me buying new phones, I'm thinking that people are constantly learning new things. But I digress...

Ok, so, Aliens. One argument that I got to that was, if they are able to travel around the universe, how come they haven't tried to colonize the Earth?  My first reaction to that is, why is it everyone's first thought that everything needs to be taken over?  Seriously, maybe that's why we haven't figured it out yet.  We aren't evolved enough.  Until we stop thinking like territorial animals, maybe we just can't access the other parts of our brain.  Perhaps the aliens that have figured out interstellar travel have also figured out that running around taking over everyone's worlds is a sucky thing to do and so they don't do it.  I mean, if you are smart enough to figure out how to travel the galaxy, there's a good chance you are all smart enough not to bother taking over a planet that is already being overused.  Why not just find another one that's fresh? Duh.  My second reaction is how do we know that colonization hasn't already occurred?  Of course, that's when people roll their eyes.  I'm not saying that it has or hasn't happened.  I'm saying that it's possible.  Assimilation not domination could be the alien slogan.  I'm not saying I believe either way.  My mind doesn't really work that way.  Nothing can be proven 100%.  NOTHING.  It can be mostly proven.  I can lean towards believing one side of an argument is more possibly true that the other side.  But I never believe 100% in anything as true.  Except what I see with my own eyes.  And even that is subject to my own perception of reality.  What I see with my very own eyes could be perceived completely differently than how another person sees the same exact thing with their own eyes.  Anyway, my point is not really about aliens.  My point is that to think that there is anything that is impossible and will always be impossible seems silly to me. 

What I really care about is...

Note: I don't mean to sound like a commercial below, but since I'm now domesticated, these are the things I think about.  And I have a HUGE appreciation for the items below.

As you may or may not know, my house is filled with the following:

4 cats (Morpheus, Trixie, Lucy, Neo)
1 70lb black lab (Dakota)
1 Adult Male (Boyfriend)
3 Tweenage boys (G, E, M)

As you can perhaps imagine, the floors are in a constant state of "ew, what is that?!"  So, though I never thought I would say something like this,  my carpet cleaning devices are my favorite household items on earth. EVER. I love them so much, I occasionally consider leaving Boyfriend to run off with them to a tropical island.

This is my vacuum cleaner.  His name is Larry.  Larry is one of my very best friends.  When my cream color carpet starts to look black from all the friggin Dakota hair (I swear that dog explodes her entire coat of fur on a weekly basis), Larry sucks it all right up.  Larry is the best vacuum cleaner that I have ever owned.  EVER.  I have to be careful with Larry though, because he's so powerful that I almost accidentally sucked one of the kids into his belly.  That would have been not good.  It's amazing how much crud gets onto the floors and carpets within a few days.  With so many pets, we have to vacuum, at minimum, once a week. That's if we are being lazy.  2-3 times a week would be better.  Larry is my hero. 




This is Larry's BFF, Henry.  Occasionally, I cheat on Larry with Henry.  I mostly bought Henry because he's "all terrain" which cracked me up.  Like I'm cleaning the hills and streams of my home. Apparently, "all terrain" just means "can be used on carpets, hardwood, tile, etc." I'm ok with that.  Henry is a little heavy for me to be pushing around in the wilderness.  I hate mopping the floors, but I love to Henry them.  Sometimes, I use the attachment to clean the walls.  That might sound odd, but any of you who have children in the house have probably had the experience where you are walking around the house and will randomly see something unidentifiable splattered on the wall. And in weird places on the wall that you think "how the heck did they get chocolate sauce all the way over/up there?!".  Anyway, Henry is awesome.  Like when the Great Chocolate Milk Disaster of 2011 happens (where you go to take the brand new gallon of chocolate milk out of the fridge and then drop it onto the kitchen floor where it EXPLODES, at which point every child and animal in the house decides to run directly through the lake of chocolate milk.),  I just take Henry and suck it right up.  And then three weeks later when I'm discovering chocolate milk paw prints and chocolate milk splatters on the wall in unusual places throughout the house, Henry helped me out.  The latest thing was cat pee. One of the friggin' cats was feeling like an a-hole and decided that everyday was a fine day to pee on the carpet in the hall in front of the front door.  And washing the whole rug every day was becoming tedious and didn't seem to be getting the pee smell out.  I put some of that special cat urine cleaning stuff into Henry and cleaned the carpet.  That finally got the smell out.

It IS a miracle!!!

On a side note: I was also having the problem that one of the cats was always pooping next to the litter box instead of inside it.  I tried different litters, cleaning them daily, adding more boxes...nothing was working.  It's been driving me crazy for months.  Finally, I'm at the pet store, just staring blankly at things, and notice this litter attractant stuff:

I heart you!

OMG IT'S SO FREAKING AWESOME!!  So far...It's only been 4 pooh and pee free days.  I won't get crazy thinking that there has been a miracle but I will gladly continue to buy that stuff if  it means that all four cats will go potty where they are freaking supposed to.

I guess my point is that I never thought that there would be room in my heart of things like carpet cleaners and vacuums.  And now I'm in love with the ones that I own.  I'm not sure how many more of these drastic life changes I can take!

Jenn - I should have my own infomercial...