Day: January 26, 2009

You’re talking to a CHEO Lottery winner right here.  When I got home on Saturday I perused the mail.  Lo and behold, there was a gift certificate for $125 to HBC…so Zellers, The Bay or Home Outfitters!  Score!

Not too shabby for our first foray into purchasing lottery tickets for an organized charity.  In the end, the ticket cost four of us $100 and we got $125 back.  Carrie, Mike, Vero and I will be heading out on a grand shopping spree with our gift card soon enough!  The opportunities are endless if you think about how much my $31.25 will buy!

Saturday, Vero and I headed over to Home Depot in the afternoon to take advantage of their ‘Ultimate Flooring Event’.  Unfortunately along the way, Vero’s car fan conked out and it was quite the cold drive.  Fortunately the next morning when I amassed my tool belt to go out and fix the problem, I was smart enough to turn the car on first and voila!  The problem had fixed itself!  I have that effect on certain mechanical devices (but alas, not my hard drive!).

We first measured the main floor (371 square feet for historical purposes) and drew out a nice little diagram.  Then we headed to Home Depot and perused a bunch of the selections.  It wasn’t until we found out that the ‘sale’ stuff was at the front that we saw things more to our liking.  $0.75 – $1.50 a square foot!  Yes sir!

Not knowing a whole lot about laminate flooring (other than the tips that Uncle Greg, Dad and Matt had provided), we waited to chat with a representative.  It took us a good twenty minutes to talk with someone but she was very helpful and in the end, Vero and I loaded up 20 cases of laminate flooring into the car which cost $0.99 a square foot.  Not too shabby.  It is now sitting in a nice pile in the living room as I didn’t know if it would hold up in the cold garage and I didn’t feel like stacking it down in the basement only to have to return it upstairs at one point.  Considering the transit strike is still in full effect and I’m still living at Vero’s, I doubt we will see the laminate get installed before the Spring.  It’s probably a better time to install it anyhow considering we have to haul out nasty, dusty carpet and it would be nice to have the windows opened.

After that, Mike and Vero napped while I read some comic books and then we rallied up the troops to go out to the Whiskey Bar.  Now, our original plans were to go skating on the Canal, get a Beavertail and end up at the Mayfair Theatre where they were showing some monster movie that was filmed here in the National Capital Region AND starred our favourite villain, Freddy (aka Robert Englund).  Unfortunately the temperatures dipped very low so no one wanted to go skating.  Vero’s cousin had called us to let us know they were headed to a dance club so plans shifted.  Trish, Vero, Mike and I first went to the Starfish Vietnamese restaurant (which is close to Vero’s) and it was some decent grub.  I would go again.  We then had a beer at her place and then headed out early to the club as we didn’t want to be stuck in a lineup.  There was no lineup at all so we went in and grabbed a booth and chatted with friends and eventually went up dancing once in awhile.  Carrie showed up with a few of her friends so I spent time meandering back and forth between groups of people and chatting.

Let me tell you something about dance clubs…it reminds me so much of this episode of How I Met Your Mother in which a bunch of the characters express their distaste with these clubs because you can’t hear a thing people are trying to say and the entire episode has subtitles.  I wish I had subtitles the other night!  I definitely couldn’t make out 99% of what people were saying so I just went along with the moment.  There was a funny moment where I was standing by the bar and a girl stumbles into me and says “I’m trashed, are you?”.  I proceed to say “Not really” but she continues to chat it up, all the while stumbling and having the zombie look to her.  I managed to spy a few of her friends and pushed her towards them so they could take care of her.

Hey, speaking about zombie looks, I have to say that I came up with this cool dance move which I call the Vampire.  It’s when you lift up the collar of your shirt and hide behind it like vampires do behind their cowl of their cape.  Mike and I perfected this move and it was a hit.  I distinctly remember Michael Jackson’s Thriller coming over the speakers and everyone started into a choreographed routine which incorporated the vampire dance move!  It was great!  It was like all those films where every high school prom somehow has a professional dance troupe within it!  For those who were at the club with me and wish to comment on the truth of this past paragraph, please refrain and revel in the fact that YOU were part of it!

We ended the night with a sub-par schwarma (definitely should have walked another block to Marroush).  Mari-Eve was asking what this ‘schwarma’ business was all about.  I find it interesting to note that schwarmas are definitely not engrained within the Northern Ontario culture.  I have mentioned on many an occasion that if I were to open up a business within Kapuskasing, it would be a schwarma joint.  I would make a killing.  They are so delicious and I think we would put Thong La’s out of business as a late night dining area.

All in all, a decent night was had but I’ve realized that I have officially retired for the scene during the winter months (if not all year long).  My old bones can’t take going outside of the house on a cold January night to come up with new dance moves for the masses (although I’m sure there will be films made of me at one point – the creator of the Vampire dance move.)

*update* For some reason, I had forgotten that Trish added a lot to the vampire move.  The vampire move is only at 50% power if it’s performed solo.  But if you add a woman who is pretending to scream, it is a full-out 100% dance move power!  Sorry to Trish for forgetting to mention!  Considering this the public apology!

It is with great sadness that I report the following…unless a miracle of technology occurs, my 320GB portable hard drive is dead.

Unfortunately, all my pictures since 2001 were on this drive.  I did manage to back up my pictures from 2007 and 2008 onto another drive before it died, and I do have 99% of my pictures up on Flickr, but alas, I would think that I have lost any videos that were on the drive as I had never got around to uploading all the videos.  Plus, I’m sure there are a few pictures that I never managed to get up onto Flickr.

I have a vague recollection of doing regular backups of my pictures but a quick scan of my bedroom didn’t produce any results.  I’ll have to do a thorough scan the next time I’m over there.

I did read a few things I could try…one method of getting a hard drive to work again is to freeze the drive to that the mechanical parts retract.  I don’t know if this will work or not.  Mike and I tried it for a few hours at home yesterday with no success and I left it outside overnight and this morning it wasn’t working again.

Another big loss for me is the mass amounts of music that I had on the drive that (chances are) I never had backed up.  Sure, I have all my CDs which probably account for 80% of the music that was on there.  This is one reason I love buying CDs still.  If all my music was solely digital, I would have to go through the pain of downloading all that music again.  Unfortunately, I can say with great confidence that the remaining 20% were some good downloads…mostly live and rare tracks from my favourite bands…some live concerts that I attended in the past and are quite hard to find on the Internet again.

So what have I learned from this?  Well, I’ll keep trying to get the hard drive to work…I’ve even checked out some videos on Youtube on disassembling the hard drive and replacing the heads.  That will be my next solution.  It does require that I hunt down the exact model number of my broken hard drive to get the parts out.  This may be…ridiculous to achieve.

I have learned that it’s quite ridiculous to hold out on backing up information for the sole reason of ‘saving a few bucks’.  I knew the drive was failing a few months ago.  It just wasn’t working from time to time.  That should have been the point that hammered me over the head and said “Go spend the $100 and buy a new drive and transfer your data.”  In the end, instead of doing that, I am not without precious bits and bytes and wondering why I would have even waited to make such a purchase.  It’s silly, and there’s no excuse.  Just because it’s Christmas and money is needed elsewhere doesn’t mean a damn thing when it comes to pictures and other important data being lost.

Here’s my main point for all you faithful readers out there:  If there is important data on your hard drives, make it point to do regular backups, whether it be onto DVD, another hard drive, or uploading photos to Flickr.  The Flickr option may be the best option when you analyze the fact that a DVD may degrade over time as well as a hard drive.

If there is stuff on the drive that you really don’t care if you lose or not, well don’t fret too much about backing it up.  But it really doesn’t hurt to pick up a $100 external hard drive nowadays and use it solely for backing up information.  Especially if you have a Mac, they have the Time Machine backing up software which is supposedly amazing.

I vow to get my data off the drive no matter what but I’m sure there will be a stopping point.  I don’t think I feel like spending $500-$1000 to get my data recovered.  But I’ll keep my ears open for people who have tried different things to get their hard drives working and I’ll make an effort to get it off myself.  Hopefully in the future you’ll see a follow-up posting saying I was successful!