Knights of the Realm & The Dutchess of Pork

Never being one to pass up the opportunity to wax poetic on the vagaries and complexities of the British way of life, I found myself wonderfully engaged in a brief discussion on Knighthood. I'm for it. I loved the original idea behind a Knighthood - rewarding and recognising a British citizen for duties above and beyond the call, but find the title sadly watered down by giving it away to pop-stars and rugby players. I would expect to find them being offered on ebay before too much longer:

One knighthood for sale, slightly used, £200 o.b.o.
buy an OBE and get free shipping!

Silly really - How many people do you have to give an honor to before it stops being an honor?

Then there's Fergie. The Dutchess of Pork. When I was starting my first year of boarding school in England (the stories are most definately not true!) Fergie came by to officially open one of the new buildings... this one actually:


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The teachers lead her round the classrooms like a prize bull showing her some of the children hard at work.

They came to my class.

The press had been arranged at the far end of the room so they could get some good shots of the Dutchess fraternizing with the lower class scum that comprised our classes. I was sitting there, minding my own business with a bloody great big calculator sitting next to me, graph paper in front of me, calculations (we called them sums in my day... before we could afford the extra syllables) all over the paper. The dozy cow stops in front of my desk and asks me...

"What are you doing?"

I mean... come on... don't they teach more interesting conversational points in royalty school? Being myself, the completely honest young man that I was (hadn't developed my overwhealming sense of self yet) I answered the only way I knew how...

"Math"

I think she was stunned slightly - how dare this 12 year old snot dare say such things to a Royal?! regardless, she soldiered on, asking the girl next to me what she kept in her pencil case (yep, you guessed it... pencils).

Well - apparently the woman keeps a grudge, the rest of the day every time she saw me, she would glare in my direction!

heheheh - great first day!

Data Recovery Part III - Almost done!

Well - after my last supremely wonderful post that simply pwned the problem, I get home last night to do some more fiddling and take some pictures (below) and find the "fixed" drive no longer accessing. Figures. In typical Adam-fashion, I had over-engineered the solution and it turns out it is much simpler than I thought...

Before I get to that though, here are the steps I took to swap out the PCBs and why I, once again displaying the supreme arrogance expected of me, thought it was a good idea:

1. Check that the two drives are identical by comparing model numbers, if they're not identical, this is likely to fail like Ms. South Carolina answering a question:


2. Now, check the part numbers on the PCBs (since even two identical model number drives can potentially have slightly different components) - not the serial numbers, the part number should be printed on the board itself and not on a sticker:


3. With all numbers matching, you should be able to swap the two circuit boards and expect them to work with each other. With that in mind, unscrew the boards (you'll need to make sure you use the right screwdriver here, the screws are a little soft and these particular ones needed a star-shaped bit of size T8):


4. Screw removed, carefully lift the PCB from one edge and peel slowly off the grey sponge, be careful not to tear the sponge:


5. Note the contacts on the PCB:


6. And the contacts on the Drive housing:


7. Now just switch the two boards and screw back down. Operation complete!

Now - when I first did this, the "broken" drive was recognized and I thought "sweet! now I can image it, restitch and get my data again!" but as I mentioned earlier, when I double checked last night, the drive was once again not recognized. Nice.

However - and here's the clever part - I found that squeezing the drive housing and PCB together (after mounting of course) gave me the access I needed!


And there you have it - a much simpler solution and no real need for removing the PCBs! Especially since I checked the "broken" PCB on the good drive and it worked fine! Take a closer look at the contacts on the PCB - see how they are slightly corroded? I think this is the point of failure on this drive and squeezing them together makes a better connection and allows the drive to access properly. Of course, it could be something completely different like squeezing the boards together makes the computer gods happy... but I prefer my way!

Caveats: The above steps were not necessary for my recovery, but if they will work for you, you should still follow standard procedure and ground yourself and your surface before working on anything relating to computer hardware. If you're even slightly unsure about any of these steps - DON'T DO THEM! I am not an expert, but I've worked with hardware long enough to be able to attempt something like this.

Warnings done - back to the fun stuff next posting! As always, here's your video for the day!

Data Recovery Part II - the son of the return of the revenge of Data Recovery

Okay - quick update on the data recovery ongoing drama... I swapped out the PCB cards mounted on the two hard drives and found that I was able to access the data on the "broken" drive. That should mean that I can take an image of each of the two drives using the Runtime Data RAID Reconstructor software one at a time, then use the same software to stitch them back together into a single drive image. Simple, huh? There appears to be a very low failure rate for this, so I'm pretty confident (arrogance making a strong return to the fore) that we can get all of our data back!

What's amazing to me is that more than a few companies wanted to charge me over $2,000 minimum to do this! Again, I understand that these companies usually work with larger organizations that can afford $2,000 easily, and that they were giving estimates without being able to look at the drives or investigate the issue - but still... The services were starting at $2,000!

So, shopping around for drives, I have decided I need a little more space and am now looking at 750GB or 1TB drives... Samsung is making the top of the list right now, but I'd be happy to use another Western Digital if I can get it at a good price. The best WD I can find right now is $235 or so for 1TB at Bestbuy.com - decent, but still a little high for me right now (see "not made of money" comment in previous post). Samsung appear to have slightly quieter drives (though with 8 case fans on my rig, I'm not sure I'll notice the difference!) while WD seem to be a little faster access (though at less than 1 microsecond difference, I'm not sure a guy on speed-laced espresso would notice).

We'll see - in the meantime, I'm looking at taking the drive out of a removable hard drive I have (one of the WD myBook drives) and using that to hold one of the drive images for reassembly. I'll let you all know how that goes. I'll also take some pictures of the PCB transfer so you can see what I'm talking about...

for now, keeping with tradition, here's a video about computers:

WE'VE LOST EVERYTHING!!!!

Well, maybe not...

So we come back from vacation on Saturday only to discover that my home server had crashed worse than an epileptic driving a robin reliant. I had a RAID 0 array setup for performance (two hard drives, striped data, half goes to one drive, half to the other) into a 500GB combined drive - one of the drives failed thereby losing all of my data. Arrogance flowing freely, I never bothered to back up the data so had a minor break down of "WE LOST EVERYTHING!!!!!" for a few minutes. I come back from vacation and find the system trying to restart but failing with the drives clicking away like an obsessive compulsive with a new clicky-pen.

When I'd finished, I spent some time researching data recovery services and started getting a few quotes on how much it would cost to retrieve the data. First one I get back - $2,000 starting range. SWEET JESUS! Second quote, between $2,500 and $6,000. F*%! ME GENTLY WITH A CHAINSAW! Now, I understand that these companies are used to dealing with corporations with data loss whose data is more valuable than $6,000 but come on...

Ranting aside, I thought about it some more (meaning, I found a dark corner to cry in) and came up with a possible solution. Still need to buy at least one more drive (because you know, I'm made of money), but by taking the PCB from the broken drive and replacing it with the PCB from the working drive, I am able to access the data. A little more online research yields a nice piece of software that lets you image your drives and stitch them back together into a unified drive image that you can then pull the data from. Total cost: LESS THAN 6 F&$@ING GRAND!

Phew! Deep breath...

So, now I need to get a new drive... preferably one around 500GB, so I'm looking around for deals if anyone knows of any...

Vacation was good though! I'll post an entry and pictures shortly. In the meantime, here's a video with an animated baby in it...because... it's Tuesday...

More buff than a car shining commercial

I started weightlifting last weekend - one more attempt at actually doing something good for me! A friend of ours gave us a weight bench with a set of olympic weights and a nice 45 pound bar - then proceeded to kick my ass with a workout the likes of which my body has never known! To be honest the workout was great, it was just another case of the mind being willing but the body... not so much. I've taken it easy for a while though, trying to recover - I'll get into it more seriously when we get back from our trip but I've been reading up on the principles and am looking forward to seeing some results!

The workout my friend showed me was based on one created by Mark Rippetoe in his "Starting Strength" book with only a few variations. With more squats than a Midwestern chili cook-off, the workout focuses on building core-strength and working from that... the idea being that with a strong core and some muscle-mass, you can start working areas individually to become the living Adonis you've always wanted to be. I've been reading a lot at:

Educating myself and trying to figure out what the hell a Skullcrusher is, or a Pendlay Row or HIIT - a translator would be helpful... I'm getting there though, maybe even start posting stats somewhere when I start tracking them!

With all this testosterone flying around, seems like the perfect time for a little Britney Vid:

New Digital Camera

We just picked up a new digital camera after our old one decided it no longer wanted to cooperate with us... We'd been using a Kodak Easy Share z740 for a couple of years and absolutely loved it - a little bulky like the first round rejects from "America's next top model", but took great pictures with minimal effort. Something buggered it up though and the lens stopped extending when we turned it on... Thought at first we had gotten sand inside the mechanism, so I took it apart, cleaned out the sand and reassembled... no dice, still buggered, not happening. It is entirely possible that I didn't reassemble properly, but I'm usually pretty good with these things, so I'm going to be entirely too arrogant and assume that I did everything right as usual and there is something else wrong with the camera!

With our impending trip to San Francisco and my birthday (yay - happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me...etc, etc)we decided to take the plunge and get ourselves another mid-range digital camera. We stuck with Kodak because the color chip was one of the best we've seen, and until the z740 stopped working, it was a great little camera. Toodled off to BestBuy and picked up an M833 - much smaller, shinier, lighter and with a couple more megapixels...

It had me at shiney.

We veritably skipped home to play with it and ran into our first problem - the pictures didn't look as good as with the old camera... WTF? finally figured out the ISO was automatically setting too high... forced it into ISO 64 and everything is peachy. I'll let you know more when we get back from the trip, but the birthday pictures turned out pretty good!


This is not the camera we picked... almost though, those flash cubes are so sexy!

Mr. Manners

So, I was talking with my wife the other day (that's right, my wife - sorry ladies) and we got to talking about how rude some people can be... Our discussion actually started on children's increasing disrespect for their parents - for God's sake, they gave you life and you're pissed because they ask you to do something?! Where the hell does that attitude come from?! Your parents don't owe you anything - you owe them everything! Don't get me wrong, there is a point at which parent's requests should be pushed back or denied, but when it is something small and innocuous, why would you bitch about it?

But back to the original topic - when I was at school in an undisclosed foreign land (England is still foreign when you're living in the US!), we were taught several things about how to be polite, most memorably towards women. We, of course, meaning the boys in the class... strange that there was never anything about women being nice to men... Anyway, we were taught things like:

1. If you're walking behind a woman on her own, cross the street so you don't make her nervous


2. Never walk too close to a woman you don't know, you'll make her uncomfortable


3. Always make plenty of noise as you walk so you don't surprise a woman when she realizes you've been following her for the last 3 miles


4. Never look prettier than the woman you're with - it creeps them and others out

Apparently they don't teach those things in school anymore...

ADD day!

So - after the posting about coffee, I was dismayed to discover that the people I was lunching with don't drink coffee! One even had the effrontery to state that he'd never had a cup in his life! OMG - have you been living under a rock?! But wait - while my friend doesn't drink coffee, he is addicted to energy drinks... and what is the primary component for providing energy? That's right! Our good friend caffeine!

Another of my favorite chemicals starting with "C" is capsaicin - the stuff in hot sauce that burns! Recently (well - sort of recently, Feb 2007) a new "hottest chili in the world" was entered into the Guinness Book of World Records - the Bhut Jolokia. Rated at over 1 Million Scovilles (the measure of capsaicin and therefore heat) - your average jalapeño is somewhere between 2,500 and 10,000 scovilles - the Bhut Jolokia almost doubles the scoville rating of the previous world record holder. Sounds fantastic no? :) I'm going to have to see about ordering some and growing them at home... use them to frighten small children and stop those damn llamas eating my grass..

It's ADD day here at Adam's Allegory - was mutually assured destruction ever a good idea? Remember the cold war? well - maybe not "remember", but remember hearing about the cold war? Stock piling weapons because everyone thought if several major super-powers had enough ordinance to destroy the others several times over, noone would want to risk attacking anyone else? stupid idea - all it would have taken was one mistake, one misunderstanding and the whole world could have been wiped out. Morons.

In keeping with the theme - when will the bottled water fad finally end? How many people realize the vast quantities of waste this is producing? I'm all for having good tasting water in handy containers, but when you're throwing away 30 of those containers each week, you're really not helping...

Environmental rant over - more amusing things next week!

Coffee, coffee, coffee

I love coffee - not just like - true, deep, sweaty, slightly disturbing love. I, along with many similarly addicted people around the world, do not do well without atleast 3 or 4 cups of coffee each and every day. I start the morning with a giant tub of the stuff that I usually finish before I reach the interstate - a good thing for all other motorists I'm sure.

I sometimes wonder where we would be without coffee - people being people, you know there would be another source of caffeine that everyone would be addicted to. The only one springing to mind being tea. Tea is not a beverage for the impatient. A good brew takes at least 2 minutes - way too long for your average addict - while coffee can be done in seconds (espresso even faster!). Would that make the world a calmer place, or would we simply leverage all of our technological advancements into brewing tea quicker? Would an espresso machine work well with tea leaves?

I've always wanted to try Russian tea - hot from a samovar - concentrated, strong, enough caffeine to put hair on your eyeballs. But, I'll never give up my coffee addiction. Coffee seems to enhance ADD - I like pie! Look! A bike! Let's fly kites! (fun!) There is serious argument for coffee being the most addictive substance on earth - it doesn't hurt you, gives you a buzz, makes you 9,000% more productive and is served on pretty much every street corner thanks to delightful capitalist enterprise from small mid-western towns!

I can type so fast, I can't see my fingers - but only after my 5th coffee (after the 9th I start moving backwards in time).

Coffee video:

Positive tracks...

Well - after a slew of reviews from the two of you who actually read my blog, I am amazed to discover that people agree with me about the whole bathroom privacy and anonymity issues! This shocking development further emboldens me to continue waxing lyrical about all manner of salubrious happenings and turn this blog truly into an allegory of monumental proportions! (how many times did I refer to a thesaurus for that last line?)

Let me pull us away from contemplations of a scatological nature and steer us instead towards an incomplete and wholly biased consideration of bluetooth earpieces. A more asinine invention I have yet to experience (with the possible exception of the lap-pillow) - who in their right minds wants to wander around looking like they are talking to themselves? How do I know if you're talking to me or on your phone?

Then there are those who insist on wearing them even when they're not using them! I was out for dinner with my wife last week and bore witness to a bridal shower where the bride and several of her (presumable) bridesmaids were wearing the things! Is it that important that you be ready to answer a call before it has reached the end of the first ring?! Can the person calling you not wait the extra two seconds for you to pull your phone from your pocket / handbag? I'm sorry, but the 'bling' value of these chunky, flashing, distracting hunks of plastic crap is right down there with the chromed spinners on daddy's new SUV.

Rant over - bring on the morphing kitties:

I'm told it gets easier...

On my second coffee already and it's not even 9... I foresee a future of many many bathroom breaks - should help break up the day at least. Always interesting in the men's room - most people don't even seem to think about it, but you can tell a lot about a person by their bathroom habits... For instance, what does it say about a guy when he's using a urinal and grunting every two to three seconds? Who spends time actually washing their hands, and who just rinses? Does anyone in the stall actually make noise while someone else is in the room? (I for one do not - something obscene about others listening to your bowel movements... maybe if I was French)

Bathroom visits are an almost clandestine event - you don't want anyone to see you go in, hear you while you're there, or leave behind any evidence that you've been there. The whole ninjitsu training system may well have been developed by embarrassed Japanese warlords in their paper latrines.

Then there are the obnoxious few who apparently don't feel any need to be quiet or private about this mid-day ritual - talking to others in the room, letting loose with painful sounding grunts and groans, or making phone calls. Who the hell wants to get a call from someone on the toilet?! Can't you wait? Is it really that important? Then they're not only embarrassing anyone else who comes in the room, but they're making the people on the other end of the line uncomfortable too:

Obnoxious one: So do you want to go out this Friday?
Victim: I'd love to...
...flush...
Victim: Where the hell are you?
Obnoxious one: erm.... at church?

WTF?!

In the beginning was the word...

I never know how to start something like this... I'm not one for sharing my innermost thoughts with anyone and everyone, so why did I start this blog? I recently started a new career track, Project Management - maybe that accounts for it!

The wonderful world of Project Management! I've been heading in this direction for a while and now that I'm here, I'm not entirely sure what I should be doing! My organization has been great - they've sent me on training courses, are providing me with on-the-job training, and are easing me into my new duties slowly but surely... but I can't help thinking "am I missing something?". It could just be my newly-developed OCD, but I keep thinking they're paying me too much for the amount of work I'm churning out right now!

I'm spending my days reading about the various and sundry PM methodologies and trying to envision their use in our organization... A few of my favorites so far (in no particular order):

• Agile (yes, i know this covers a gamut of methodologies, but I like the overall feeling)
• Rational Unified Process
• Critical Chain Management
• BRUF (Big Requirements Up Front) with Charrettes

But how to use them in our organization and business unit...?