My yang month
Right... As I wrote to a friend already, in my yang month December a lot of ying is missing... Let's start at the beginning, the beginning of December 2008.
First the contract (I'm a contracter) for my daytime job got cancelled (The economical crisis is everywhere) and it's very dificult to find a new project in December (end of the budget year). On the upside, this leaves me with some extra time to work on (Club)RopeMarks.
Next my phone decided to buy a one-way ticket to mobile-heaven, so I had to quickly decide if wanted to buy that way too expensive phone I had my eye on for some time already... I did :). My Outlook was synchronized in a breeze and I spend the next days figuring out how to actually make a phone call on the mobile-PHONE that I got :)
Time for RopeMarks... uhm, it would have been time for RopeMarks if my computer didn't make the brilliant decision to follow my mobile phone to heaven (taking a left to computer-heaven where my mobile went right to mobile-heaven). Luckily the computer didn't break down completely so I had time to bring my backups up-to-date. I keep two backups on external hard disks and I have a total of 4TB in external hard disks.
So, while I made sure my backups are up-to-date I was figuring out what should be under the hood of my new machine. For those technically interested I decided on a Dell Precision T7400 with some custom changes/additions (i.e. faster CPU, more memory, more hard disk space) running Windows Vista (32bit).
Delivering the machine would take a few days but before that we had a long weekend in Paris (the Nuit Demonia weekend), a few days after our return my shiny new machine was delivered, oh happy day, I could quickly set everything up and start giving you the you the new updates.
Since I have 4TB of external hard disk space holding two backups of our data and extending my internal hard disk space to about 1TB, I thought it was a good idea to do some overdue maintenance on these disks and get everything neatly ordered for the years to come. Now here I discoverd (one of) the nasty parts of Vista; copying from external hard disk to another external hard disk takes _ages_. Moving 1TB takes about 2 days!
On top of taking a long time you have babysit this type of action because of the annoying Vista UAC (User Account Control) and the "improved" rights management. One example (I have so many :( ) is that moving, say, 1 GB is calculated at, say, 1 hour. You are bother with the UAC, wait one hour and the result is that only, say, 60% has been moved. So you move the remaining 40%, calculated at, say, 20 minutes, are bothered with the UAC, wait 20 minutes and... nothing has been moved! Certain files are simply not moved by Vista.
Anyway, after a few days of moving files around (thanks Bill!) and searching the web I installed the program TeraCopy. It was a recommendation on different forums and I have to say, it works like a charm! Moving terra bytes of data still takes a long time but it works and I don't have to babysit the action
Finally, all my data moved and roughly reorganised the way I want it. Time to setup the new backup... if only, at that moment, one of my external hard disk did NOT decide to fail on me @^$_&@_(*@!#$&*^_@)$(%. Ofcourse (hi Murphy!) this was the disk with the backup of ALL RopeMarks material (photo's, video's, text, the works) #$%)(!#%^_%_)*@#$... If you're still reading this (with more than mediocre focus :) you know I have two backups, so no real harm done yet but should my other disk bail out on me RopeMarks would be in serious trouble. Hopped on my bike (as if :):):), took the car :) and bought a new 2TB disk for my backups.
During all this moving, copying, cursing Bill and babysitting we have had an upgrade of our webserver machine. This upgrade happened on 22 December between 22:00 and 09:00. You might have experienced some downtime.
So, the current status is that I'm still moving stuff to my new external hard disk. This should be finished within 6 hours (according to TeraCopy's calculations). While the copy/move process is going on I'm unable to use any other USB hardware connected to my machine (i.e. memory card reader) or my firewire port (i.e. capturing video), this will screw up the copy/move process on my external USB hard disks (Bill?!?) . During the failure of my old computer and external hard disk I know I lost e-mail. If you've send me mail and do not receive a reply in the next week orso please resend your mail.
I hope to be productive again during next week.
Everybody all the best wishes for 2009!
two comments:
Many thanks for all the pleasure you have brought me over the past few years, and a very happy New Year to you and Bob.
roger () - 07 01 2009 - 03:05
Thanx Roger!
Bob () (URL) - 08 01 2009 - 19:36
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