damn

Unexpectedly, my external hard drive quit on me the other day (I suppose it never happens expectedly, but I've certainly had more warning of an impending drive failure). One minute, it was cranking along, saving a few episodes of the BBC version of "Blue Planet". Then, after a restart (not a crash, I just decided to shut down and restart the computer) all of a sudden I'm getting messages about the drive not being readable, and for a while the computer wouldn't even see it plugged into the Firewire port.

I ran Diskwarrior, which gave me bad news - it couldn't repair the drive due to serious drive error. It found all the files which had been on the drive, but when I tried to backup what I wanted to save, all I got where copy errors due to a bad disk.

This was a 150 GB Firewire drive, where I'd been keeping all my media files. I'm not too worried about losing some TV episodes I've already watched and all our wedding photos are backed up.

But it was where I was keeping all my music. I can recreated a lot of it from our two iPods, but I'll lose a decent part of the library. Most of our photos are on the laptop's drive, but there were a few photos I had on the now-defunct drive. Also a few other random folders of stuff I wanted to keep but didn't use often, so kept on there to save disk space.

Our personal photos are on the laptop drive, so we've got them, and I've got another, smaller, external hard drive I backup most of our important documents. I didn't have enough storage space to back up the drive which failed; I got it to be a backup. I've suffered through three major hard drive crashes in the past five or six years. None of them are pleasant.

This spring the drive in our laptop failed. Luckily I managed to salvage it enough to back up what I wanted before sending it off to Apple for a replacement. I think last week our extended warranty ended, and the laptop is acting up again (or is it my imagination?) enough to make me worried for my data.

Time for a new drive. I don't want to keep an army of drive to backup my backups (and I don't want to pay for them, either) but every time a drive fails it reminds me what a pain in the ass it is.

i'm an idiot

I've been listening to NPR the last few days and one of the big stories has been the demonstrations in Burma, or Myanmar.

I couldn't figure out why the commentators kept referring to the country as "Myanmar, formally Burma." The distinction confused me.

After probably three days, I realized the word was "formerly Burma."

I haven't been doing too well at quiz night either.

For those who don't know but might care (a potential audience of, let's see - zero) I'm not a big fan of the current spate of legislation designed to make it easier for the government to spy on people in the U.S. without oversight. Especially since all the arguments this administration has put forth tend to be exaggerated or flat-out wrong.

Such as the push for the recent law to circumvent the need for FISA warrants. Newsweek has an article today on how one of the arguments made to Congress, that the law had helped foil a terror plot, was simply wrong.

The article

great googly eyes

Once upon a time, a Google search on myself turned up a list of articles I'd written for various outlets. A while back, the list became a bit more sparse when the Hattiesburg American put all its archives behind a fee wall (and now you're hard pressed even to find the page where you can pay for my past writings).

There are a few quirky pages the American has kept up, which means this is one of the few remaining easily accessed and searched examples of my work. Had someone told me these articles would be the cockroaches of my career, surviving the destruction of all else, I would have put a bit more thought into them, rather than churning them out as quick as possible to fill sports' quota in an advertising section. They never tell you the important details at the time.

And the new top page on my egotistical Google search is also curious to me. It's a comment left on Ryan's old blog. Nothing against Ryan, but a page of his comments is apparently deemed more important by the Internet community than any other example of my writing. Beware the new media...

Iran

Yesterday on NPR, a story on the problems in Iraq and how the lack of troops available in the future will limit options was followed closely by a story about Iran. The second story included this quote:

Similarly, the Bush administration is divided over how to deal with Iran, with advocates of diplomatic engagement in the State Department — there have been two rounds of U.S.-Iranian talks in Baghdad this year — having to fend off pressure from more hard-line figures, like Vice President Dick Cheney.

It's not clear at the moment who is winning this battle, says Karim Sadjadpour, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The piece indicated the consensus option seems to be that the Bush and Iran administrations are posturing. The implied threats of force on both sides are just political games to get the other to capitulate.

But any talk of action against Iran seems to be ignoring the elephant in Iraq - we don't have enough troops now. So either the "hard-line figures" are posturing or they're willfully ignoring reality. Or both, which seems to be the default setting these days.