Is planted! I ran out to take some photos, but then my man's card reader (which is the only one that works with my old Casio now) stopped working because a computer he was fixing for a friend picked up a virus from a shared thumbdrive. Argh. So I have pics... but you can't see them!

Go Canucks Go Tonight!

Not so much, it seems. My man went to build a system for a client yesterday. Drove all the way to the computer store to get the parts, got them home, sat down to build the computer. He pulled the Antec NSK 1380 (nee "Aria") out of its box and marveled at its compact nature and sleek looks. Did a double take. A triple take. You see, it was shipped without a drive cage. And no, drive cages are not optional. They're how you install the hard drives and optical drives into the box. We looked very carefully and it looks like a brand new unit, not refurbished or returned at all. So this must have been from the factory.

Antec, for the fucking last time: Get your shit together!

We got a booster antenna for our router this summer, since we started to share our signal with the people one floor up (long story) and set up a second router on their floor as a wireless access point. But ever since then I swear I've been getting more headaches and can't focus as well as I used to. It might be the weather changing or whatever, but there really isn't any conclusive data (that I can find) on the effects of Wi-Fi signals on people. Since the booster antenna is sitting about 8' from my head all day, this is a bit of a concern.

Anyhoo, I was wondering if anyone else experienced the same kind of symptoms (including the paranoia) or if I'm just crazy.

I'm probably just going nuts. I hope I am, I guess...

After much fussing and loss of hair and sanity to my video encoding habits, I finally bit the bullet and bought a quad core processor. I read the reviews and balanced the numbers, and I stood to gain about 50% of my time back, so at $230 it was worth the sacrifice.

I must say I heart this chip. Quad is SO much more uber than dual. :)

Ugh.

Ok, so before leaving for Mexico I picked up a WD Passport external hard drive. I thought it'd be handy to backup my work on in case the laptop (god forbid) has anything happen to it en route.

Before we jumped on the plane for home, we used the bundled WD Sync software to encrypt and back up all of the photos and such we made while in Mexico. Seems simple, yes? I created a profile and everything seemed to work just great. Then, to deter any nosey border fellows, I deleted the pics from my laptop.

Today I plugged in the passport to grab a few more non-Elli files from the laptop before porting everything to my desktop computer. Well, q'elle suprise! There's no more data?!

This is what I found after much surfing:
http://forum.hddguru.com/passport-dml-file-extension-encrypted-files-t9299.html

"If you are computer savvy...you should realize that the WDSync software is not backup software and is, in fact, just syncing software. So, if you delete something from your desktop it will delete it from the Passport as well, next time you sync. However, EVEN IF you are computer savvy, you probably wouldn't have guessed in a million years that DMailer would make "autosync" the default setting and that they wouldn't tell you ahead of time or prompt you in some way before it started deleting files. So, if you want to use WDSync to sync your data between your computer and your Passport, before you do anything else, SHUT OFF autosync and always manually sync. If you are not interested in syncing your data and just want to backup your data, skip the WDSync software all together. Don't use it. Just use the Passport like a jump drive and drag and drop your files to it."

So....

fuck you Western Digital. Fuck you very much.



LUCKILY I had a copy of everything saved to an encrypted drive on the laptop. VERY, VERY LUCKY.

Ok, so my laptop died last night. So this morning I checked Future Shop's website on a whim. They had a full loaded-to-the-tits Dell Studio 15 that I've been eyeing for months. For only $1149, too, which is below Dell's price (with coupons) on Dell.ca. So I checked it out. I bought one. Heck, they threw in a 3-in-1 printer for $10!

So I opened up the laptop in the parking lot, thank the computer gods. The box looked new, but there were HUGE scratches across the screen and a gouge/divot out of the case lid.

I examined the box more closely. There was a shipping sticker. It said it was sent from Dell Returns in Ontario to Best Buy's Western distribution center before arriving at the Bridgeport Future Shop. It was unit 3 of 24, sent on August 18th. Odd, n'est pas?

I walked back in and returned the laptop. The guy tried to blame the scratches on me at first, but the manager agreed with me. He suggested I look at the other one they have in stock. I did. Surprise! Even worse scratches and a divot in the centre of the screen! The case exterior was mint, at least. THAT box had the same shipping sticker, but was item 10 of the same batch of 24.

So, do I pay $1400 after taxes for a laptop that is obviously a Dell return/refurbished unit that Future Shop is trying to sell as new? Sadly, no.

I wonder if Dell knows these units are being sold as "new in box" items.

Last night, about 34 hours before I was to leave for Mexico on a jet plane, my eSata drive started ticking. It's a brand new drive in a CoolerMaster X-Craft enclosure, and I use it for backups. I was trying to access it to update some stuff on my site at ElliNude.com, but it was no longer being recognized by either Linux or XP. The drive worked fine in our other enclosure, but that one was already in use. Then we tried the power cord on the other enclosure. Same result.

Now the other drive also ticks and doesn't recognize.

So at 1:15am we gave up on that and decided to go to bed. Only to find that the laptop we added a brand new hard drive and 1gb of RAM to a few days ago now has a critical problem. The hard drive unseats. Or a solder is broken. Regardless, it has trouble finding the hard drive and shows a "no support os" error instead of booting up. This is the laptop we were going to bring to Mexico for work.

So, do we tighten everything down on that one and hope it works? Or do we go back to my 4 years old laptop, put the DVDburner back into it, maybe put the new hard drive in it, and hope IT works?

Holy smokes! I'm about to kill somebody!

I've been in crunch mode for about a week now. The big Florida show is coming up on the 6th and I just took a look at my calendar for August. It's ridiculously packed. I get back from Florida, then the next day we go camping in Osoyoos. Then the day after we get back from camping, it's time for a friend's stag weekend. Then the wedding. Then the end of the month and I need to get more shoots done, so it's time to reserve a place for that. Gah! Erg! Eek!

So right now I'm getting all my future updates that I have in the bag ready and online, so when it's time to update, I just have to change my main pages to reflect the new links. So far I've done one video and one photo update. I'm working on another photo update tonight (a very sexy one in a slinky black dress!) I *hope* to get the other video at least rendered by tonight, if not uploaded. That leaves tomorrow for reformatting my laptop and getting it all loaded with my software. I really must have a pedicure before I leave, and a hair cut. And I need to run to the states and fill up the car with gas.

Tonight I made spaghetti for dinner so the leftovers will take care of tomorrow's dinner as well. We even have some sourdough bread left over for garlic bread!

Cross your fingers for me that I get everything done!

Hello world!

Sorry I've been neglecting you! A few days ago I noticed XP was running like a bag of shit. So I decided to re-install it. then I realized my hard drives were full, so there was no way to move stuff around to empty the C: drive enough to safely format it. So I went out to buy a 500GB Western Digtal HDD and a handy dandy eSATA HDD enclosure for the purpose of mirroring important stuff that I want backups of (which is almost everything.)

So I got home and started moving stuff onto the new drive. But it filled up and I still hadn't backed everything up that I wanted. So I went back to the store and got ANOTHER 500GB HDD, since they were still on sale for $85 a piece. I took out my 320GB Seagate and put in my new 500GB WD. Happiness! Ok, so now I was ready to format.

My man had installed Ubuntu the night before, so I wanted to try that, too. I would really rather move my whole workflow over to open source if it's possible, but I doubt it is quite yet. Anyhoo, why not start now, right?

Ok, so my HDDs are partitioned and cleared. Everything important is on my eSATA drive. I installed XP 32bit, then Ubuntu Ulitmate 1.8. Peachy! Now comes the onerous task of replacing my critical software loadout. Ugh. Argh. Tedium! Monotony!

I tried to get the dual monitors working in Linux to no avail. Blah. NVidia, I shake my fist at you angrily!

Today I am back in XP to work on my next video, which is due out tomorrow but I doubt will be rendered in time as it is already 2pm and I'm just starting to capture it off the camera.

So how has your week went?

Seriously. This scientist fellow recovered a hard drive that fell from the sky out of the exploding Columbia Space Shuttle six months after the incident. It was warped and melted, but he managed to recover the platters inside the drive and install them in a new drive. Guess what!

"However, at the core of the drive, the spinning metal platters that actually store data were not warped. They had been gouged and pitted, but the 340-megabyte drive was only half full, and the damage happened where data had not been written.

Edwards attributes that to a lucky twist: The computer was running an ancient operating system, DOS, which does not scatter data all over drives, as other approaches do."

If the space shuttle was running DOS, a) Why is the Space Program so bass-ackwards and b) How much better could it be with new technology?

Let's review: the 340MB harddrive (for scale purposes, I have a 500GB harddrive in my own home computer) was only HALF FULL of data. Was it written in COBOL or something? Jeepers, people!

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/05/09/columbia.data.ap/index.html

... you need to STOP INSTALLING SHIT on your computer. Just stop. Walk away. Turn it off and don't turn it on again. You broke it. You obviously can't read a ToS or uncheck the prechecked boxes when you install handy things. Please just stick with ATM machines and leave the home computer alone until you're ready to handle the responsibility.

;)

I leave for Phoenix this afternoon! I can't wait to see the heat and feel the sunshine! Errr...

My monitor has been acting oddly today. I don't like it. It's exactly 13 months old, so now is *not* the time. Last month was the time for this nonsense. Suck it up, Mr. Monitor!

Nothing is going right. Well, some things are but they are easily overshadowed by the not so right things. At least I got my browser working again. Firefox was playing games with me this morning, showing up in my process list but never actually loading enough for me to use its beautiful functionality. I scanned with every virus and malware scanner I have and found nothing related. I disabled all non-essential processes in my startup sequence. I uninstalled and reinstalled firefox. No love still. So I finally ran FF in its handy dandy safe mode, which I should have tried before. It let me run FF with all extensions disabled, which finally worked! So I slowly re-enabled them and uninstalled all the ones I no longer used or were no longer supported. So far we're working, so cross your fingers for me. See, that's one of the things that went right today, but wasn't quite a good thing.

Ok, I was cleaning up my bedroom dresser when I found an iTunes gift card my uncle had given to me last Christmas. So today I plugged in my info, only to find that in order to download songs from Apple, I need to have the dreaded iTunes software installed. This is insulting. Not only do I have to nagivate through your happy-Apple universe to find music, but I have to install your process-happy computer-dominating music player? Give me a freakin break!

So I installed it.

Now it's busily converting all my .wma files to .mp3s so I'm ending up with doubles of everything. The only funciton of iTunes that I do like is its organization. It likes to sort songs into folders named for the artist, album, etc, which pleases my OCD heart.

I'm a Winamp fan, and was going to download the new Winamp today. I heart Winamp. It's free, simple, easy to use, and doesn't take over my computer. It can manage any portable music device I ask it to handle. It can listen to thousands of free Shoutcast radio stations. I love Winamp, and Winamp loves me back.

Is a $50 gift card worth installing Apple software? Only time will tell. Stay tuned, boys and girls, for the stunning conclusion!

Ok, I've sent my Antec NeoHE 430watt power supply off to RMA Land. I have now upgraded to a moduldar Enermax Liberty 400watt, which I am quite happy with. I'm having it installed at the moment and posting from my laptop. Speaking of which, something else could use an upgrade....

Well my new computer is not feeling quite so new today. Yesterday when I tried to boot it up in the morning, the hard drive light was flashing away, but there was no display, just a black screen. I rechecked all my connections and tried again. Same result. I turned off the switch at the back of the power supply and walked away to take a deep breath. An hour later I tried again, and it booted up verrrry slowly, showing a barely perceptible Windows splash screen as it booted. On the next restart it worked fine.

Gr.

So I Googled. And this is what I found. Antec, in their infinite wisdom, released the P150 case and it's bundled NeoHE 430watt power supply knowing that they were incompatible with many, many motherboards including ASUS. (Scroll down to the second Post Script on this page.) See this thread to post your experience with an Antec NeoHE power supply! Note that in that forum thread, people were still buying defective power supplies with the P150 cases in mid 2007, even though the problem was identified and supposedly fixed in 2005. Not only that, but many of the power supplies seem to have come with their warranty labels already torn. Mine is one of those.

So today I am going to try to RMA my power supply. In the meanwhile, I think I'm going to just bite the bullet and buy an Enermax. The NeoHE was underpowered and under-efficient, anyway. You can see the full review here.

Colour me disappointed. I love Antec cases to bits, but I don't think I'll be buying a power supply from them any time soon.

This is a FIRST, ladies and gentlemen! Ever since I first had my own computer (as in not shared with my mother or my at-the-time-boyfriend) I have never had an entirely new system. I may have purchased new parts here and there for minor upgrades, but the majority of my computer has always consisted of hand-me-downs.

No more! Tonight my boyfriend is assembling my brand spanking new computer! (He is sooo amazing at cable management!) Here's what's going into it:

Antec P150 case
Asus P5K S775 P35 chipset motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 2.33GHz 4MB cache 1333MHz
4GB Kingston DDR2 667MHz RAM
7600GT video card
Zalman VF700-ALCu video card cooler
Pioneer DVR-212D SATA DVD writer/reader
500GB Western Digital 16MB 7200rpm SATA drive
320GB Seagate IDE drive

The Seagate drive is from my current setup, so it's not SATA. The video card is new, but a gift from a friend who upgraded. The RAM is a slightly-used gift from my man, who also upgraded. So my machine will be soooo new! I am very, very excited! I'll actually have a computer that's current and can process my photos and video without hiccuping or taking several hours!

Photos will be posted when I'm online again! Yay!

I looked long and hard at my traffic stats, and it seems a good 75% of y'all are still using regular 4:3 monitors, so here's a wallpaper you can enjoy without any extra fiddling! :)

(Right click, Set As desktop background)

It does! My cpu fan is dying a slow death. The temperature in there is 42C now even with the side panel off (you don't want to know how hot it got before I removed the side.) It just underlines the fact that I need a new pc. Luckily the "back to school" sales are offering deep discounts, so I can get my parts for fairly cheap prices. Unluckily I did not budget for this and I was going to put the money towards a new camera instead. Such is life, I s'pose.

Bring on the long weekend!