Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.
Congratulations to my brother and his wife on the newest member of their family, Vivian Woon Marie Mah (they seem to like to give their kids lots of names).
For you baby fiends out there, this is what my brother said about her:
Vivian Woon Marie Mah
January 18, 2006 @ 10:28am
3.88 kilograms or
8 pounds 9 ounces
After a day of running the Dell Diagnostics, only one bad block on the 160GB drive and a flaked out Zip drive were found. Fortunately, the Maxtor utilities were able to scan and repair the error without any loss of data (that I’ve discovered yet). The Zip drive seems to be pretty much dead and won’t read anymore Zip disks, so I guess that might as well come out.
Now, what to put in the empty bay…
Boy time sure flies. This month’s e-Trail from the U of A Alumni Association reminded me that this year marks 15 years since completing my BSc, and 10 years since completing my MSc. Doesn’t seem like those carefree undergrad days were so long ago until I think about what’s gone on since then.
Unfortunately I’ve lost track of most of my fellow classmates, so I don’t know what anybody’s been up to these days or what kind of progress they’ve made in the physics world. Would be interesting to find out how some of them are doing. Maybe I ought to do some literature searches.
In the meantime, while most of the rest of the country is taking the day off for MLK day (I’d forgotten about it), I have an RF room to test this afternoon. I guess that explains why it was so easy to get the room today…
The computer at home decided not to boot up properly anymore. Gets to the Windows boot screen, then does a BSOD, and reboots itself. So after doing this a few times, I booted up the Dell diagnostics and started running those. At least two tests on one of the drives failed, saying ‘a possible failure is predicted by the device’s SMART status’. Not sure which drive it is yet, but with my luck it’s probably the one with all the important stuff on it and no recent backup done either (I was getting around to doing one, really I was). Go figure.
Hopefully I can figure out a way to recover from this enough so I can at least copy some of the more important stuff to another drive.
I have a feeling it’s going to be a long night.
Update: 10 hours later it’s still doing the read test on my 160GB drive. 1 bad block found so far, which hopefully will be recoverable. Hopefully I won’t have to reformat it or anything. That’ll mean losing a lot of non-critical stuff like captured videos, photos and all our ripped CDs. Inconvenient, but not fatal. If this is the only problem found, then I’ll have gotten off lucky. I have a feeling there will be more though.
It’s not often that I get sick (thanks to this hardy Canadian constitution of mine), but when I do, it’s usually a doozy. So much for hoping to get better by the end of the weekend.
Yesterday was Nala’s first day in Real Life 101, an obedience class held out in public areas with plenty of distractions to deal with. Nala did pretty well doing what we asked her to do, but getting her to stay focused on us was a bit tough.
After class,we had a little bit of time left on the meter, so we went for a stroll downtown. Nala did pretty well walking around with all the people and cars.
If you happen to be strolling down King St in Charleston with your dog, stop in at Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville. They’re very dog friendly and welcome pooches in the store. They even have collars and leashes in the back. Just make sure your pet doesn’t pee all over the place, or you might end up buying a few more things than you planned. Nala was very good in the store, and got lots of attention from one of the staff who also has a black lab.