Too much free time is dangerous

This was going to be part of my last blog but I thought it warrented it's own space. Think of it as an addendum, or better yet, a spin-off of the last blog. Kind of like our favorite spin-off: Stargate Atlantis. Without further pontification, sublimation, or ado.... I bring you a repost the story I forgot to blog about.

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This is why too much free time is dangerous. This weekend was like the perfect storm. My wife went out of town (no supervision), my computer died (no games or other entertainment), I finished the book I was reading and really had no homework to speak of. Being depressed by the computer crash and lonely since my wife and all but 1 of my friends is out of town for the weekend I am looking for something to do. The 1 friend in town works on saturdays, but when he gets off he says he is going to an oktober fest party and invites me along. I jump at the chance.
Through some slight miscomunication I am on the way to the party when I realize it isn't an Oktoberfest as much as it is just a party at some guy's house that he throws every year for oktoberfest. This brightens me up because it means I don't have to pay to get in, or buy beer, or deal with a big ol' crowd and public drunks.
The guy throwing the party went to high school with my friend's fiance, so I will know exactly 3 people at the party. As you will see, that doesn't stop me in the least and with the help of alchohol, my inhibitions and judgement are non-existant. I will let Scott, a guy I met at the party tell the story through his blog on myspace.

The following is an excert from Scott's blog:


Quote:
Move over Flaming Moe's behold the Flaming Marshmallow!
Current mood: amused
Category: Food and Restaurants

Oh yes, I am currently recovering from an Oktoberfest Party that my old high school friend Jeff threw last night. He has a fire pit at his house needless to say you know the dangers of fire and alcohol!! While sitting around the fire and having a few beers and bratwursts the question of the availability of marshmallows arrived. Jeff being a bachelor had some but likely they were purchased in 2004-2005 time frame. Realizing that we have discovered a new material to re-tile the space shuttle with these marshmallows, again beers, engineers and fire (beware, experiments will commence). To soften these lightweight briquettes we figured on soaking them in a mixture of 2 parts vodka and 1 part rum and Wow! You definitely have something special here, marshmallow shots! Even better roast these marshmallow and you have the Flaming Marshmallow, that's right in the same spirit as the Friend's invented game of Fireball! Ironically the best part about it all was the mixture that you soak them in the marshmallows slightly dissolve in the alcohol mixture and actually makes vodka and rum go down more smoothly, enough to sip! If you gulp the following results below. And yes this is footage from the party! I would like to thank Curtis for being the stuntman for this trick!

BTW, there were 2 chemical engineers, and aerospace engineer, and aspiring electrical engineer (me) and a professional councelor (as in someone who should know better) involved in that whole fiasco.

Its dead Jim

So last week my computer died. By my computer I mean the control board on my main hard drive. Kristina went to K-town to visit her parents and all but 1 of my friends where out of town. I took this rare opportunity to play Company of Heroes online with some friends until about midnight. I went to bed with dreams of gaming all day Saturday dancing in my head. I got up the next morning about 8 am and crawled into my office. My computer was not sleeping as I expected nor was it quietly and patiently waiting for me to start some delicious games. No my friends, instead it was sitting at the BIOS screen waiting for me to insert a bootable disk or drive.

This next bit is for you more techno savvy among us:
My immediate action is to hit the power button, pull the plug and go take a piss. As I contemplate making a pot of coffee I plug my computer back in and hit the power button. The computer POSTs, runs through the RAM check and then hangs on the IDE autodetect. After about 30 seconds of watching the little blinking cursor blink in the same spot I start to panic.
I am going to fast foward through a few hours of frantic phone calls, hard drive swapping, and much much much swearing and bring you up to about 1:00 in the afternoon.
At this point I have determined that some little tiny piece of silicon on the control board on the bottom of my hard drive decided 3 years and 2 months was a long enough life and it didn't need to do whatever it is that the little piece of silicon is supposed to do. The drive powers up just fine, I can feel the platters spin. There where no warning signs of mechanical damage like the click of death but I tried the freezer trick anyway. The drive is not recognized as being attached at all, I tried it on 3 motherboards. Some boards hang on trying to detect the drive and some just don't bother and skip over it no matter how adamantly or precisely I tell the BIOS exactly what kind of drive is attached. Conclusion: bad control board, perfectly good platters and heads. If I can't get a computer to see the drive how the hell am I supposed to use all my sweet recovery software? The drive is exactly 2 months out of warranty and it has also been discontinued so no one has an identical unit in stock. There go all my hopes of getting a free replacement or a good drive to cannabalize parts off of in an attempt to recover my data.


Regular readers pick up here:
This dead hard drive had all of my personal stuff on it, you know, pictures, this semesters' homework, emails,and inexplicably all my backups. I swear I had my backups going to another hard drive. I guess I was wrong, lazy, or careless. I finally resign myself to the fact that I have lost everything with no chance whatsoever of recovery. The next logical step is to begin to rebuild. I head out to Fry's Electronics to pick up a new drive. They don't have any of the drives I want in stock. I head over to CompUSA and Best Buy. They have the drives I am looking for but for exactly twice as much as my favorite online merchant. While I am desperate to get my computer back up and running quickly I am not "pay twice as much for the same thing" desperate.
I head home dejected and lonely. When I get home I go online to www.newegg.com and order 2 hard drives

Tech alert: I am running a Raid 1 array of 2 -250GB SATA Western Digital drives. 100% data redundancy FTW!!!!11!!1! I find it slightly humorous that Fry's had no Western Digital drives in stock except for some high priced Raptors.

I now sit and wait patiently for 3 days for my order to process and ship. As usual newegg is disturbingly fast and efficient with my order. It is processed by Sunday night and the drives ship Monday morning. UPS 3 day ground gets them here in... drum roll please.... 3 DAYS!
So Wednesday night I begin the system rebuild and that pretty much brings us up to today. The system is back up to my personal standards and I have begun to install all those unnecessary additions.. like games.

I know it was probably a pretty boring read but thanks for sticking with it. This was a pretty big deal in my book and I will be saying things like "I had a copy of that but it died in the crash of '06" for years to come. Just like I still say "I had that album/song until the drive crash of '02". Case in point: Don called me yesterday asking for an updated resume.
One of these days I will learn to stay diligent with my computer back-ups.

If ignorance is bliss, then bliss is over-rated.

Sounds profound (or maybe it doesn't) but its a little something I said one night when I was drunk and I was able to remember it the next morning. This tells me that there is something profound in the statment and it has become a kind of mantra for me.

My geek name is Excess3 and I am now a blogger.