The End of the Road

Wow, looks like I shouldn’t bitch about too much work (though I did nothing today). Some of my friends have come to the end of the line EI wise and are having to deal with that. Hopefully they’ll get lucky soon, and get some sort of work, or create their own like I have. Maybe it’s time to look outside the box and head to a job in construction (a la Office Space).

Today I had a breakfast meeting with the ASP guy, got our ducks in a row for the work coming up. I was supposed to be writing a bug tracking system today, but ended up getting sidetracked 🙁 On my way home from that I stopped by a guy that I met through the FVLUG who may not know a lot about Linux, but sure as hell knows a lot about cars and finishing. Anyway, we (he) fixed up those dings in my hood, doing them nicely and quickly, and except for a bit of a polish to blend the clearcoat/blender into the rest of the hood, it should be good to go. You can still see a bit of an impression on one, but I’m not complaining, he did a great job and it didn’t cost me a $300 deductible.

Coming home from that I was in a fixing mood and not a creating one, so I decided to get down and figure out what is up with the HD I have. This is one of the ones I got from Cat5 a couple of months ago, and anytime it gets to a certain point on the drive, things just freeze up. I noticed it when I had to reboot hard a week or so ago and I couldn’t do things after a bit. The rebuilding of the RAID5 parity was about 33% through and things just wouldn’t go anywhere. I had heard one of the drives clicking a couple of times, but not in a decidedly bad way (but not good either). As I had no problems at the time, I did the typical geek thing and ignored it. I ran a bad block scan on it and on block 26385488 of 78nnnnnn it froze up again.

“Ah ha!” I think, hardware. So I finally got around to unplugging it, plugging it back in, trying it on a different cable, and finally, reformatting it under windows. I downloaded a tool off of the Western Digital website, but it refuses to boot up for me. It just says “Loading Caldara DR-DOS” and stops, no disk activity or anything. The same disk does the same thing in two other floppy drives, but works fine in my other computer. Right now I’m in Windows on my main box trying to fill up the drive to see if it does strange things at around 33% full. It formatted (NTFS) just fine, so I’m kinda wondering. I’ll throw it onto the other windows box here (that booted up the diag disk fine) and see if it says anything. Maybe a low level format as well, and if not, it’s RMA here I come. Of course, it’s too late today to do anything, and no one is open on sunday, so I can’t get anything rolling just yet. So I’m running on 2/3 drives right now for my big data storage drive, which sucks, but if another drive does go (unlikely) I will only loose some mp3s (again). I was smart and rsynced my /home to a back up just in case.

I think after I update this entry I’m going to start working on this journal. Take some of the stuff in this page, maybe change the layout a bit, put in some of my old archives (my journal dates back a while you know). I noticed that sillz has her archives back to 1998, so hey, good stuff. Not sure if I’ll enter them into MT or just link them yet though. Might throw some MT plugins in as well.

Might even do some work.