my life, my thoughts, my world.

The iPod is dead. YAY! Official count: 2 laptop hard drives (both 60GB Fujitsu units), 1 40GB iPod. Happy Happy Joy Joy.

Well, apparently the guy I paid for internet service out here was shot about a month ago. My contract with DirecWay is up, and I don’t really see any feasible way to renegotiate service. I’ll be on when I can from either my company’s internet shack, or from the TOC at work. This will limit me to odd hours, short time spans, and put me back into the position I was in in Kuwait – where email is the best way to get in contact with me. I’ll update as necessary.

update: I’m back online – the people that actually handle this account in the UAE have switched us back on, and will be sending someone to collect funds eventually.

Quick post just to say Open G rules. I love the blues. That is all.

From the bits and pieces I’ve gathered on the news, New Orleans is pretty well destroyed. Leave it to the scum of the human race to take advantage of this and go about their malicious ways, making a bad situation worse. If you consider yourself a decent human being, you had better be doing something to assist the relief efforts. A lot of people lost a lot of things, those seeking the spotlight can argue until they’re blue in the gills about where to place blame, but that does not help a single thing. Get off your backside, go help your local Red Cross, or a shelter, offer someone a clean set of clothes – do something. God knows I would rather be deployed to New Orleans right now than Baqubah – but we SPC types don’t get to make that call.

edit: If you’re not willing to help, go put your feet up on a table, and do pushups until you pass out.

Given the volumes of concerned emails from folks noticing my two day absence from AIM, Yahoo!, and IRC, I figured I’d post. I am the king of dead hard drives. The 60GB drive in my FujiP died – or rather showed signs of terminal illness. I came back from lunch to the clickety clack of a dying drive. I managed to recover my picture directory before it completely ceased all disk access. The only logical thing to do from here was to put the drive in the freezer, and pray, so that’s what I did. In the process I discovered the 80GB drive I suspected was dead – was in fact alive. The battery for its enclosure however was dead, oops.

Things went fairly well, I managed to recover my entire homedir from my 60GB after it spent some 8 hours in the freezer, as well as important configuration files, and scripts I neither felt like downloading, nor re-writing. So now I’ve got Windows XP Pro (courtesy of my restore disc) and a fresh Ubuntu Hoary install co-existing happily on the FujiP. I haven’t had Windows on my laptop in many, many, many months, and it honestly makes me sick – I’d forgotten how much I hate most every quirk of the Windows world, but now they’re all fresh in mind. I probably won’t boot to XP again in Iraq, and even then probably only for a handful of apps that are Windows only.