Life

General ramblings connected to my personal life and activities.

Wikipedia Birthday Meme

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Earlier this month there was a Wikipedia Birthday Meme running around that, given its subject and the proximity to my own birthday, I figured I’d just hold off on playing with for a bit.

So, three weeks or so after everyone else, it’s my turn!

Go to Wikipedia and look up your birth day (excluding the year). List three neat facts, two births and one death in your journal, including the year.

May 3rd:

  • Three ‘neat things’:
    1. 1937 – Gone with the Wind, a novel by Margaret Mitchell, wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
    2. 1959 – The first Grammy Awards are announced.
    3. 1971 – All Things Considered, National Public Radio’s flagship news program, broadcasts for the first time.
  • Two births:
    1. 1933 – James Brown, American singer
    2. 1959 – David Ball, British musician (Soft Cell)
  • One death:
    1. 1758 – Pope Benedict XIV (b. 1675)

iTunes “Coriolan Overture Op. 62” by Sydney Symphony Orchestra (Jose Serebrier) from the album 200 Greatest Classics, Vol. 14 (1995, 8:18).

Back Home

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We’re back. Family and friends were visited, many photos were taken, fun was had. I’m starting to get photos uploaded to Flickr, though so far I’ve just taken care of Friday’s shots. The rest (including many cute shots of my nephew) will have to wait ’til I’m home from school tomorrow.

In the meantime, here’s my girl at our hotel in Corvallis…

By the Pool

iTunes “You’ve Got A Friend In Me” by English Chamber Orchestra (Donald Fraser) from the album Bibbidi Bobbidi Bach (1996, 4:06).

Out for the Weekend

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Prairie has an educators’ conference of some sort (she knows the details, and there’s a good chance she filled me in on them at some point…) down in Corvallis this weekend, so we’re going to be gone for the next few days. We’ll be driving down to Corvallis tomorrow, getting a hotel, and then visiting with Prairie’s friend Barbara; Saturday I’ll have the day free while Prairie’s busy to visit with my brother, sister-in-law and nephew, and we’ll have dinner with them Saturday evening; Sunday will be the drive back up to Seattle with a stop off in Vancouver (the Washingtonian one, that is) to visit with Prairie’s mom and sister.

Should be quite nice — we haven’t run away for a weekend since August (which was also a trip to Corvallis).

Back in a few days….

iTunes “An American in Paris” by San Francisco Symphony Orchestra (Seiji Ozawa) from the album Panorama: George Gershwin (1977, 18:01).

Winnie the Pooh and Syphilis Too

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On the way home from school, Prairie and I stopped off at Toys ‘R’ Us to pick out a present for my nephew Noah, who we’ll be seeing this weekend. As we were walking out we passed a coin-operated Winnie the Pooh ‘horsey’-style ride that was playing the Winnie the Pooh theme. Prairie didn’t hear it at first until I started humming along.

As we were driving home, she suddenly turned to me. “Damn you! Winnie the Pooh is stuck in my head!”

I laughed. “It’s not my fault…it was the machine!”

“I didn’t hear the machine. It’s your fault.”

“I had to share the pain,” I protested.

“Some things shouldn’t be shared,” she explained. “The Winnie the Pooh theme is one. It’s a lot like syphilis.”

iTunes “Variations on “I Got Rhythm” for Piano and Orchestra” by Orchestre National de l’Opera de Monte Carlo (Edo de Waart) from the album Panorama: George Gershwin (1971, 8:32).

A bit of a pickle…

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Last time I visited my parents in Anchorage, I was going through some of the various boxes of “me” stuff scattered around their house. Opening one up, I was amused and surprised to find a stack of notes from high school that I had saved. I don’t know why I saved them, but there they were: page after page of teenage ramblings that I’d tossed into a box instead of into a trash can.

Many of the notes were from Xebeth, since we were dating back then, and so one of the more amusing bits of entertainment on Monday evening was handing her the stack. When Xebeth could distract herself from threatening me with bodily harm for having held on to these, we got a lot of laughs out of flipping through them.

Apparently, pickles were on her mind at one point…

PICKLES! I ♥ PICKLES! Give me a pickle and I’ll love you forever & ever & 2 weeks!

…which confused her adult self more than a little, as she’s not really that fond of pickles, and doesn’t ever remember being that fond of pickles. So it was decided that, since these little tasty snacks are not only obviously phallic, but also can apparently be used as currency for the barter of sexual favors (as implied by the above quote), Xebeth was going to start a new anti-pickle group.

Parents Against Pickles.

PAP.

And, of course, since word must get out about how dangerous these insidious green treats are, a letter-writing smear campaign must begin as soon as possible.

Bingo.

A PAP smear.

 

I like my friends.

State of the Computer

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Well, the computer lives — though we’re definitely dealing with a near-total case of amnesia.

On the bright side, a new hard drive has been purchased and installed (and I love how easy it is to install a hard drive into a PowerMac G5 [.pdf link]), the OS is installed, and I’m going through the (slow, laborious) process of downloading and reinstalling all the various programs I use on a day-to-day-basis. Also, as I’ve been using Gmail as my primary e-mail address for some time now, most of my recent e-mail still exists (on Google’s servers), which is allowing me to rebuild my address book and contact lists.

So, there’s progress.

The downside, of course, is that so far I’ve been unable to coax the dead drive into doing much of anything. I haven’t given up completely, though. Using some instructions from Apple I used fsck on the problem drive and got the following:

Quicksilver:/ djwudi$ sudo fsck_hfs -l /dev/disk1s9
Password:
** /dev/rdisk1s9 (NO WRITE)
** Checking HFS Plus volume.
   Invalid B-tree node size
(4, 0)
** The volume   needs to be repaired.

A quick Google for ‘mac os x invalid b-tree node size‘ led me to this Macworld Forums discussion which indicates that either DiskWarrior or TechTool Pro should be able to at least recover my data, if not actually repair and resurrect the drive. So I think that acquiring one of those will be my next step, though that will have to wait for a week or three until I’ve got a paycheck not already claimed for little things like rent, bills, and food. With luck, though, those will allow me to pull the old data off once I get to that point.

And if that doesn’t work, then I can always try the freezing trick that’s been mentioned by Nitallica and Josh. Seems a little bizarre, but hey, if it might help….

In the meantime, rebuilding goes slowly, but I’m making progress. I also picked up an external enclosure for an old 80Gb drive I had been meaning to liberate from my old Blue and White G3, slapped the pieces together, and now have an external drive that I’ll be using as a backup repository using SuperDuper!, which I found though a rundown of OS X backup software pointed out to me by Marcus. Once that’s up and running, than even if this happens again somewhere down the line, I won’t have lost the data.

I know: backup, backup, backup! You always think it won’t happen to you…and then it does. Ah, well. So it goes.

Thanks to everyone for the support and suggestions!

Good days and bad days…

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Good days, in brief:

Sixteen years ago, during my Junior year of high school, I managed to screw up the courage to ask a girl out, and wound up with my very first girlfriend, Xebeth. Our relationship was the typical high school romance — drama, breaking up, getting back together, and so on — and at the end of that school year, the military moved her family out of Alaska and we lost touch.

A few weeks ago, a random Google search led Xebeth to my website, and she dropped a line to say hello. We’ve been keeping in touch since then, and as her job has her traveling around the country, she ended up swinging through Seattle on Monday.

So, I was able to spend Monday getting re-acquainted with the first girl I ever dated, after not having seen her in around sixteen years. It was a blast — she’d not been to Seattle before, so we spent some time in the afternoon wandering around Capitol Hill before wandering back to my apartment, getting Prairie, and heading out to dinner, then back here to chat. Xebeth and I still get along great (and flirt outrageously), Prairie likes her a lot, and it was incredible to be able to rekindle the friendship after so many years. She even put up with me lugging my camera around!

Bad days, in brief:

It appears that the hard drive in my computer died last night. A sudden Spinning Beachball of Death had me restart the machine, at which point I got nothing but a grey screen, which eventually brought up a blinking question mark “I can’t find a System Folder” error. Rebooting the machine from the OS installation CD and running Disk Utility tells me that the hard drive is fried…unverifiable, and unrepairable.

And, of course, guess who hasn’t taken the time and DVDs to back up their data recently?

SIGH

So…160 Gb of data may be down the tubes. Google has my important recent e-mail and Flickr has my most important recent photos…but there’s still a lot of other data that I should have backed up ages ago that I’m afraid I’ve lost. Replacing the drive looks like it’ll run me about $80 or $160, depending on the brand I go for (does half the price mean half the reliability?), then I get to see if I can coax the system into mounting the old drive and letting me pull any of the data over.

Gee, isn’t this going to be fun.

So…Monday was great. Tuesday was pretty standard up ’til the end, but so far Wednesday just isn’t looking very promising at all.

I’m just hoping things get better from here.

Birthday Wishes

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I’ll be turning 33 in just a couple of weeks, on May 3rd. This year I only really had one thing on my birthday wish list, and that’s already arrived, thanks to my wonderful girl (doubly wonderful, as she’d already spoiled me once!). I’ve even received another early birthday present from Royce, in the form of another year’s membership to Flickr (keeping me at the ‘pro’ level until November of ’07)!

I am incredibly spoiled.

However, I have had the occasional “so, what do you want for your birthday?” inquiry. At this point, I’m pretty much set, so kind wishes will do me just fine. But…if someone’s determined to spend a little money on me (okay, not terribly likely, but you never know), books and music are always appreciated. I’ve got a bunch of each saved in my Amazon Wish List, but there are three CDs that I’d like to call special attention to.

Back in March of 2003, I stumbled across a series of discs from Sony called the ‘Soundtrack for a Century‘, celebrating 100 years of music recordings and releases from the Sony family of record labels. Over time I’ve collected eight out of the eleven pieces of the series, and any (or all) of these last three would be greatly appreciated:

Other than that…(shrug)…as I said, I’m not too greedy. Well-wishes and kind words will work just fine.

iTunes “Atom Bomb” by Fluke from the album Risotto (1997, 5:45).