Picture My World

Scott spent a sleepless night upgrading his blog to a new version of Moveable Type along with some other goodies. It’s ironic (or maybe tragic?) that his blog still looks the same after all that effort. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not suggesting it wasn’t worth it. There are some real changes in switching photo galleries so he can display his Flickr photos. Also, the experience was probably fun even as it was frustrating, Scott no doubt knows more about MT than ever before, he has a sense of accomplishment, and he was productive during a bout of insomnia.

Is the point of a blog the content or the blog itself? Everyone draws a different line. Now that I have my own customizable solution, we shall see where my line gets drawn.

As I complained to Dave about my hard drive woes, he mentioned a Linux variant called Knoppix. Its claim to fame is that it can fit on a CD or other similarly sized storage device. Its other claim to fame is its ability to read NTFS volumes (that’s the disk format used by modern flavours of Windows, for you non-technical folk). So, I burned it onto a CD and popped it into the Dell… alas, no joy. It can’t read the drive either.

Hope is not totally lost, though. One of my IT buddies at work has some data recovery software that might just help. We’ll try tomorrow. If that doesn’t work, I know some local companies that are more than willing to take $500 from me to poke around with the drive. I really hope it doesn’t come to that, but it’s hard to put a price on months of lost baby photos.

So far, so good. A couple of annoyances so far:

• The blogger import script created a second unwanted user. I had to go directly to the MySQL database to change the post entries to refer to the “real” me.
• I found a spell checker plugin, but I can’t get it to work. After it’s installed it seems to want to reinstall itself in a /usr directory which does not exist on my server. Why can’t it just stay where I put it? I need to investigate further. So, blame the plugin for any typos you find.

I found the template you’re looking at by Gary Rogers on Alex King’s WordPress Styles page. Thanks very much, guys.

I’ve never lost any significant data before. The previous HD crash I encountered was a bad logic board and I was able to recover the drive by swapping the warranty replacement’s board for the bad one.

This time, though, I may lose a lot. The worst case is I lose the majority of my digital photos. I can’t stand the thought of losing all of those pictures. Financial records, documents, and the rest of it can be replaced but those pictures cannot. Photoshop Elements 3′s album kept reminding me to backup… and I just ignored it.

Learn from my mistake. Backup regularly and often.

I wonder when computer makers will start shipping computers with mirrored drives to prevent this most common form of data loss? CPUs are now so fast that the speed increases aren’t helping the common computer user. But, data redundancy that doesn’t require discipline or effort? That’s got to be worth something.

Crap.

The hard drive on my Dell crashed today. Dell is sending a replacement, but I’m very disappointed because 1) it failed after less than four months and 2) my last backup is older than that. “It’ll never happen to me.” Bah.

The drive is a Maxtor. This is the second Maxtor drive to die on me. The first one was maybe a 10 MB drive that died under warranty maybe 15 years ago, so it’s nice to see they’ve kept the same quality standards. I’m going to get a second drive for peace of mind and it’s not going to be a Maxtor. Is Seagate any good?

Update: A bit of web research tells me that everyone has their favourite HD manufacturers. Some people actually swear by Maxtor. I guess it doesn’t really matter and you’ll be burned by the odds eventually.

As you can see, the blog has changed. I’m now using WordPress instead of Blogger and am happy with it so far. I would have used Moveable Type but technically I’d need an expensive commercial license because of this site’s affiliation with my small business.

Anyway, lots of changes are coming as I update the template, fix some formatting errors, import the comments from Blogger, and generally get things sorted out.

Note that I’ve collapsed both my blogs (Picture My World and Use Case) into this single site.

I’m switching from DotEasy.com to HostingMatters.com as my web host. I hope to switch from blogger to another blogging solution at the same time. Bottom line — things may be a little unstable during the switch over. Posting will definitely be light.