Saturday, April 24, 2010

Voodoo computing

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I am not a big conspiracy fan; I’m not really too keen on the notion of dark spells being cast; and, I am not superstitious. Still.

Last week I was going along reviewing the hundreds of photos I took at Silent Knight Farms, when I took a break to read some blogs. I was a being a lurker and not taking time to leave comments—all taking on my part, no giving. (Hey, I may have stumbled on the key to this whole thing with that last phrase.)

At any rate, I read Chris Klug’s
post about the failing hard drives and tried to brush off the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. (Fortunately, that sick feeling these days means a psychological reaction rather than, “Drats. I’m going to be up all night and will need three days to recover from the night’s ordeal. Let’s hear it for gall bladder removal!)

Sure enough over the next day or two my computer began to behave erratically. That sick feeling came back and I got to work checking hard drives. I checked three older drives that have been in service for years and everything appeared to be A-OK. The newest drive, the 1 terabyte, also checked out. Then I got to the second newest Western Digital, a 500 gig drive that has been in service about two years, and oops, bad news. Windows couldn’t analyze to see if I needed to run the defragmenter because the drive “is scheduled for checkdisk”. Since I didn’t schedule the check, I got the message that Microsoft is trying to tell me something.

Some of you who have run Windows may be saying, “What’s the big deal? Run the checkdisk and move on.” I would except for one thing. About three years ago I ran checkdisk on a 500 gig Seagate and everything seemed to go just dandy with a clean bill of health at the conclusion. Just one small problem. The disk was clean. No, I mean pristine clean. Not a single shred of data left. I swore. I cried. I pouted. All to no avail, of course, and I ultimately went about resurrecting the files from other sources. Now, you know why I am making another backup of the disk that “is scheduled for checkdisk”, before I turn Windows loose on my data. It’s tedious work, but all that swearing, crying, and pouting wore me out last time. I’m opting for tedious this time, rather than living dangerously.

Now, I don’t actually blame Chris for this, since I don’t really believe that just because I used this computer to view and read that post my computer got the notion to follow the example of Chris’s hard drive. I’m just saying….

Up For a Quick Breath of Air


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(The photo was taken weeks ago, when snow was totally appropriate. This post was written on Tuesday, or was it Wednesday? But, it has been a wild ride of a week, and I’m going to post this as is.

Having spent last weekend at Silent Knight Farms, I came home with hundreds of photos. From early Saturday morning until late Sunday evening, I didn’t do much else other than take pictures of horses. I collected bulging folders with photos of thirteen of the horses at Silent Knight. I returned with one 2 gig and one old one gig card untouched, while everything else I own had been in a camera and gotten considerable use during the weekend. Because I was photographing mostly fast action, I accumulated a sizeable stack of discards, but I got some things that I like. I have more than enough images to keep me busy editing and processing for several days, if I were to work straight through. The entire job will take much longer than that.

Originally, I was scheduled to come home and set up another session with a friend here in Bear Valley Springs the week of April 19. Unfortunately, Spring ended here while we were relishing the balmy weather down south. Yesterday, we had rain and last night, snow. Snow is falling as I write this, and our predicted low for tonight is 28 degrees.

It seems like a good time to process photos. Inside. Where it’s dry. And warm.