July 2014

July 22, 2014

Rain Brings Rain Lilies

I’ve had my share of rain (computer problems) this week, but Matt called early in the morning to say that my computer had copied over essential files and that it had been running all night without crashing. I picked it up and started packing the van.

Just goes to show that if you can put up with a little rain, you’re liable to find your yard is packed with rain lilies when the sun comes out. (If you are a flower fan, click on the photo to make it larger.)

Headed back to Cape Wednesday

I’m trying to make it back in town in time for Smelterville’s Vine Street Reunion. I had really hoped to have a video presentation containing the interviews I had done with folks over the past few years, but the hard drive crash cost me too many days.

I will have copies of the latest edition of Smelterville: Community of Love available. Any that are left over after the reunion will be available at Annie Laurie’s Antique Shop at Broadway and Frederick in Cape Girardeau. The price is $20.

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the new pages before some of the typos were fixed and some design elements changed.

July 21, 2014July 21, 2014

Who Do You Call?

Who do you call when your computer crashes and burns a couple of days before you are supposed to take off on a road trip? Kids Matt and Adam, of course.

After I had tried everything I knew how to do, I initiated Plan C, which was to haul the machine up to Kid Matt because, as Kid Adam, dodging the bullet, pointed out, Matt’s the guy who built it and is most familiar with all the pieces/parts.

Two flaky drives

Matt called this afternoon to say that my operating system RAID must have had TWO bad drives because he was seeing corruption on what I thought was the good drive. He replaced both of them and restored them from backup. (Hint: when the system reports that you have 17 seconds left to completion, go out to dinner. It lies.)

Hit some Kryptonite

About an hour later, he called to say that he had run into a big snag: Acronis, the backup program I use, won’t write a file to a partition bigger than two terabytes. My data RAID was made up of four two-terabyte drives. Acronis wouldn’t even see them.

I had never run into this problem because I had never tried to restore everything at once. The few times I needed to go to a backup, it was just one or two files.

Plan D was for him to copy just a couple of the critical directories, then I would restore about 90 percent of the remaining data from a portable external drive I keep around “just in case.”

Backblaze is Plan E

Just this week I got an email from Backblaze, my cloud backup provider, saying that they would now be able to write your backups to up to a 4 terabyte external drive and send it to you overnight. (What they DIDN’T say was that for large quantities of data, it might take up to five days for them to copy it all TO the drive. Still, downloading it, even with a fast internet connection, would have taken about three months.)

So, I sent them my credit card number for a 4-terabyte drive containing 599,771 files and 3.296,468 terabytes of data. It cost $189.

That’s the reason you need to click on that Amazon link at the top of the page (or here) to keep me from holding up a cardboard “Will Work For Hard Drives” sign at the intersection. Amazon purchases you make through that link give me about a 6% kickback without costing you anything extra.

Here are two earlier stories I did about Backblaze.

Plan F

If Plans A, B, C, D and E didn’t work, I was ready to call in Kid Adam. He LOOKS like he could solve a computer problem if the firefighter and Superman struck out.

July 20, 2014

Man Walks on Moon

Wife Lila and I, newlyweds, watched the moon landing from a bedroom in this apartment at 157-1/2 Morris Ave., in Athens, Ohio. The bedroom was so tiny that the BED barely fit it it. It was cooled by a beat-up old air conditioner that Dad had pulled out of one of his construction trailers.

To call it a dump would be an overstatement. I couldn’t afford a police monitor for the apartment, so I’d park my car where this blue one is, and alligator-clip a pair of wires to the monitor in the car, which was attached to a speaker in the living room.

The area above the garages was divided into two apartments, the two windows at the left were for the living room; the two higher windows to their right were the kitchen. The other two sets of windows belonged to another tenant.

When we moved out, the landlord, a local lawyer, said he was going to keep our damage deposit because of A, B and C. When I complained that those things existed when we moved in, he said, “Sorry, Kid, you should have made note of them.”

About a year later, the lawyer gave me a call. “You shot some photos of a car vs. train crash that could be very helpful to my client,” he said, like we were old pals.

Trust me, I got our deposit back on that deal.

Bob painted the apartment

Photo partner Bob Rogers moved into the place when we moved out. He shot the landlord a deal: you pay for the paint, and I’ll provide the labor. What the landlord didn’t know was that Bob planned to paint the whole interior in a flat black so he could use the walls as photo backgrounds.

I wonder if the person who is living there today ever managed to cover up that black paint?

July 19, 2014

Computer Is Still Oinked

We’re still fighting the computer issue. Since it was down, I took the opportunity to not set my alarm. I had to drain off some nitrogenous waste around 7:30, but I went back to bed and didn’t see daylight until 11:43 a.m. Except that it interferred with my mid-morning nap, I could get used to that.

Once I dug into the computer problem again, storm clouds started swirling. (Figurative storms clouds. These actual clouds were taken over Cadiz, Ky. in 2012).

Geeks were busy

Slaying my dragons would have been easy had I known what I was doing, but I was cautious because I didn’t want to mess up anything that wasn’t messed up in the process of solving Issue 1.

Kid Adam had been up all night doing a migration of his own, so he didn’t check in until he was groggily heading back home from the Miami data center. He suggested I put in two new 2-terabyte drives and do a restore from backyup, rather than rebuilding the mirror.

Kid Matt didn’t finish a 130-mile bike ride (actually 129.56 miles) until mid-afternoon, so he wasn’t in much of a mood to stop by, understandably.

I’m hoping Matt can swing by tomorrow, tell me that it’s OK to push this button and select this option without launching a palm tree or causing the shower to blow up.

Remember this big ball

Click on the big red Amazon button when you order stuff online. That helps me keep feeding hard drives into my computer and it doesn’t add anything to your cost.