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Saturday, January 28, 2006 |
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Hello January? Where Are You? Are You Still Here?
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Holy shit I can't believe it's the end of January already. Ok yes I can and I always say that after I stop writing for a while. Well the truth is that the unforeseen death of my laptop hard drive really put a dent into my life. For one thing I'll never hear the end of it from Justin for loosing not only our Christmas Party Photos, but also our Christmas Eve Photos and our New Year's in San Francisco Photos. See I usually download the photos to my laptop from the camera and then copy them up to the server, only lately I've been a little slow in copying them up to the server so they tend to sit on my laptop for a month or two much to Justin's chagrin. Any who, I can't do anything about that now so like I told Justin, it's just time to move on.
So my life has been a complete wreck for the past few weeks, not so much for the data I lost but mostly for not having a fully installed, working computer. Laugh if you may, but mind you, for me having a computer is not considered a personal 'luxury', it's my life and I don't say that lightly. Basically a computer is a personal necessity for anyone like myself who's life and career has been built around technology. Without a computer I cannot write code, manage my company's servers remotely, design web applications, email, look at porn, chat, blog and basically do what's become necessary as a part of my daily life.
Ok I'll admit it's not as bad as it sounds. Once I realized that something was fried with my laptop I couldn’t waste any time being without a computer and I rushed out within the hour to my faithful computer parts store to obtain everything I needed to build a brand new shiny computer. Case, Motherboard, Processor, Memory, Video Card, DVD Burner, the works. My laptop crashed at 3 PM and by 11 PM I had a brand new desktop system built. Now this was more or less the easy part, the hard part was about to begin … reinstalling all of my necessary applications, development tools and software. This is such a tedious process, installing, configuring, updating, etc. Blah. So trying to get all of that done while also trying to get my work done at the same time, which requires many of these tools to be installed, has been a challenging task to say the least. I think I'm finally at a point where things are starting to return to normal and I can function again as a normal person.
The funny thing out of all this is that I had been thinking about possibly getting a desktop computer to replace my 3 year old Dell C840 Latitude Laptop (which I might add the warranty expired less then a month ago, go figure) but I just really wasn't expecting to do it so soon. Alas I guess we just never know when these things are going to happen.
So anyway my social life has been non-existent and work has been crazy busy, so I don't really have anything else interesting to report at the moment. Cheers.
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Thursday, January 19, 2006 |
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Lost? Gone? Forever? Say What?
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MY FUCKING PERSONAL LAPTOP HARD DRIVE CRASHED TODAY!!! Need I say more. I knew this day was going to come and I wasn't going to be prepared. Right now my laptop is sitting on the floor next to me as I try and figure out what I'm going to do to get the files recovered that were on there. Luckily about 80% of my stuff was backed up to my file server, however I've lost about ... ummmm ... 10 years of email archives, all the photos that I took in December, all my ITunes music and assorted other files that I did not have backed up.
As I said I knew this was coming, I just had a wired feeling and so I started backing things up. Well I hadn't quite finished backing everything up as I though I would have more time before this happened ... like weeks, months, perhaps even a year. But no, that wasn't the plan, I shut down my laptop this afternoon to undock it, and POOOOOF. All gone. I get the wonderful error message ... PRIMARY HARD DRIVE NOT FOUND. Ugh. I'm going to look into how much it's going to cost to restore the data from the drive as I'm really not ready to give up some of those files yet.
The moral of the story here ... BACKUP YOUR FILES REGULARLY!!!!
Oh yeah and one other thing to keep in mind here. Home burned media such as CD's and DVD's, we'll they aren't considered permanent storage. Believe it or not they have a shelf life of about 2-3 years before they potentially go bad. Oh yeah, mmm hmmm, I didn't know that one either. Well I'm off to bed so I can sulk for a few hours before I have to start work.
[UPDATE] Ok so I called a place today to see about getting the drive restored, and they said the price would be between 900-and 3900 depending on how many files they were able to restore. What the hell are they smoking, I could buy a new laptop to for that much. I guess aren't 'that' important. On a more positive note, I did have most of the important things backed up, so it's not a total loss. I guess it's all just a sign for me to stop worry about the past and move on with the future. :-)
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Thursday, January 12, 2006 |
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Happy & Content
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Wow, I can finally start to get caught up with my reading and writing. The first two weeks back to work in the New Year are always very busy for me and I just haven't had any time at all to write, read or do much of anything socially.
So with that said, I just want to say that I'm really pretty damn happy and content right now. I really don't even know how to begin to explain it. This feeling really hit me last weekend when Justin and I were taking down all of our Christmas decorations. I was out front taking the lights off the house, it was just getting dark and yet still somewhat warm outside. I stopped for a second, looked around and smiled. Berger was sitting in the front yard watching me, and I could see Justin through the dining room window taking down the tree. I had a really warm feeling come over me as I thought ... "This is our house, this is my family, and I'm happy" I just couldn't stop smiling and I felt great. I just wanted to tell Justin how much I loved him and how happy I was, but since I'm a really a bitch at heart I of course did NOT. I thought it, so that's what really counts and he can read about it once I make this post. I know, I know you're probably thinking "wow that Rich Brown is just such a romantic guy... " I know I am and I just can't help it. :-P
So to my surprise, I've felt this way for the past week now. I feel AMAZING, I love my life, I love Justin, I love my friends, I love my pooch, I love our house, and I just love being alive ... and no I'm not on fucking Ecstasy right now! For once in my life I'm really happy, and let me tell you firsthand, that's not a feeling I've had often in the past few years. I almost always find some reason or another to stress myself out and rob myself of the simple pleasure of being truly happy, so for now I'm just going to ride this wave. I knew that things have been getting better for me in all aspects of my life over the past year and I feel like now I can finally just relax, take a deep breath and enjoy myself. If this is any indication of what the year has in store for me, it's going to be one hell of a great year. I love you all! Ok maybe not really. Cheers!
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Podcast #2 - My New Microphone
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A short < 2 minute podcast
Click the icon above to listen to the MP3. Cheers!
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Been There Done That
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Justin and I finally went to see Brokeback Mountain (aka Bareback Mountain) last friday night with Mark & Andrea. I'm not going to give my commentary on it because it's been all over the media and if you don't know what it's about you need to pull your head out of your ass and tune into the world. Hello. Welcome.
All I am going to say is that in my opinion it was an incredible movie. It was sad and usually, being the big fucking nellie queen that I am, I would secretly cry to myself on the inside, but I didn't this time. As much as I enjoyed it, it didn't tap the 'Cry My Eyeballs Out, Joy-Luck-Club' emotion nerve with me. Oh well, I really liked it none the less. And just for the record here, real gay men only cry on the outside when they break up with their boyfriends, so as to make the ex-boyfriend feel like total shit and think he really meant something to us, which we all know is the biggest lie in the book. :-) Cheers.
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Saturday, January 07, 2006 |
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The Big Gay Guide
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@HOME. Ok so if you haven't seen it yet, JMRA Technologies has just released a beta version of their new product, The Big Gay Guide. The website is pretty damn cool. You can find gay bars and other gay & lesbian stuff for a metro area on one map without having to map out each location. It's all free and should be pretty useful for those of us that travel. Check it out at http://www.thebiggayguide.com.
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Wednesday, January 04, 2006 |
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Back from San Francisco
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@HOME. Yes the rumors are indeed true, we're back from San Francisco. After leaving San Francisco right around 2 PM, Justin, Mark, Andrea and I got back in yesterday morning around 6 AM. Yes that's right kiddies, it took us 16 hours to drive back to Phoenix. If you've ever made that drive you would know that's about 5 hours too many. Apparently it was really windy coming down the I-5 through central California and a few trucks overturned in the road which forced the closure of all north & southboud lanes of the I-5. This resulted in us sitting on the I-5 in bumper to bumper traffic, moving at about 5 miles an hour for about 3 hours. Once we hit HWY 41 we were forced off of the I-5, re-routed back north up HWY 41 to Fresno, and then down HWY 99 to Bakersfield which was a 2 hour detour. This SUCKED! But since there are little to no roads through central California, and the fastest was to San Francisco from Phoenix is through Los Angeles, we were stuck.
So aside from our little detour, our trip to San Fran was pretty good. Here's the brief summary of our trip ...
Day 1 - Friday Day 2 - Saturday
- Drive. Arrive in San Francisco at 2 AM.
- Sleep. Wake at 11 AM.
- Eat at Welcome Home in the Castro
- Go shopping in Union Square.
- Visit friends.
- Stop at Safeway to get food. Eat.
- Go out for New Years Eve. Get shitfaced.
- Stop and buy a flask bottle of 100 proof Rumplemintz & 100 proof Southern Comfort at 2 AM on the walk home from the bars. Get more shitfaced.
- Sleep.
Day 3 - Sunday
- Sleep. Wake at 3 PM.
- Eat at Baghdad Cafe in the Castro.
- Have Bloody Mary's at Harvey's & People watch
- Walk around.
- Sleep.
Day 4 - Monday
- Sleep. Wake at 11 AM.
- Pack clothes.
- Say Goodbye to Friends
- Leave city at 2 PM.
- Drive.
As you can see it was a pretty short yet jam packed trip. It was really great to be able to see my friends Bernard and Mark again. I miss them both. I also have some great photos from the trip but I have to download them first and then I'll post. I'm off for now. Time for my dentist appointment. Cheers!Labels: Bernard
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