Weird USB Drives

You all know how much I love stuffed animals, and how I can't stand to see them in "pain" to the point where I am unable to eat food shaped like animals. The pics below are of the winner of the top ten weirdest USB drives of 2007, according to fosfor gadgets.




































I admit, the bear is cute, but the fact that you have to remove its head in order to use the drive... I find that a bit disturbing! I'm trying to pretend that this bear is just sticking his head in the USB port to look for something. That takes my mind off the fact that his HEAD WAS REMOVED. Poor bear!!!!

Identity crisis

One L. Two Ss. It's really not that f***ing difficult.

This happens to me too often for it to be a typo or bad luck, and it's usually the same people over and over again. People just don't give a crap how they spell my [real] name. I think that's rude. It's especially annoying to see my name incorrectly spelled when 2 lines above the body of the email, in the To box, the email server has correctly resolved my name and displays it. Hey, shit-for-brains, look up! See that name? Yeah, that's how you spell it!!!

I have enough trouble with my last name as it is. Having my first name misspelled just adds to it. GRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!

Seriously though, how do you handle these people who don't seem to give a crap? I want to, but can't, be unprofessional about it at work. I am, however, incredibly sick & tired of seeing my first name get mangled. I've come to expect it with my last name, but come on -- my first name is not difficult, and the company address book can tell you how to correctly spell it. Any suggestions?

I just realized

that I will be on the West coast for the Oscars. I won't have to stay up until 1am to see the end of the show! Woo-hoo!

Lonely finger

If you see me not wearing my engagement ring, it is just because I dropped it off for sizing yesterday at itaCast in Moncton. I've had it for 10 months now and it has been loose all but a couple of days during that time, so I decided it was time to have it fit me a bit better. Unfortunately when I sized myself initially, I didn't take into account that it needed to fit more snugly -- until now I'd never worn a ring on a regular basis.

It may take 2 weeks to finish the sizing, but I trusted getting it done there instead of locally. They do all of their own work on-site so it doesn't get sent away, and it was cheaper because that was where we bought the ring initially. If anything ever did happen to the ring during sizing, dealing with the store that sold it to us, they would be more likely to help us out.

I've never been a ring person, but I adapted quickly to wearing my engagement ring. It feels odd now when it's off my finger. I'm wearing my high school grad ring right now so I don't fall out of the ring-wearing habit. I keep doing a double-take though when I look down and see the crest instead of my diamonds & sapphire. :)

If anyone is looking for jewelry, I recommend going to itaCast. They have good stuff, and the prices are better than anything else I've seen. They'll even build something based on a picture or your own design. I'm glad I followed Jenn's recommendation. :)

Friday Feast

Appetizer
What comes to mind when you see the color orange?

Halloween, my favorite holiday.


Soup
Did you ever get in trouble while you were in school? If so, what was it for?

Once for looking out the door and down a hallway. Once for joining the crowd and slamming desk lids. I lived in fear of getting in trouble, so I really never did anything to get into the situation.


Salad
Which topping(s) make up your perfect pizza?

Ground beef and bacon


Main Course
Do you believe in UFOs/aliens/etc.? Why or why not?

I think there are other beings out there in the universe. I am not convinced that they do anal probes, though. I don't think alien visits to Earth are as widespread as some think. We're just not that interesting. It's hard to believe that humans are the only things out in space though.


Dessert
What color is your bedspread/comforter/quilt?

A light shade of purple, of course! What other color would I have?

Unfortunate event #2

This is not turning out to be a great week. On Monday night, I was at home, watching TV. I decided I'd better head downstairs to check the fire, and I was greeted with another flooded basement. I had been downstairs a couple of hours previously and it was dry, so needless to say, I was pretty surprised to see the amount of water.

My first thought was that the same problem I had before was back again. I checked the door and it was not flowing in through the area where I previously had a problem. There are 3 holes in my cement floor for pipes, two are in the future bathroom and one is by the sewer pipe in the storage room. What happened was that the water table reached so high a level that it came up through the holes and overflowed. The all rain-no snow winter we've been having has meant an excess of water hanging around, and Monday's rain was the straw that broke the camel's back.

The ditch that runs through the back of my property was also water-logged and stangnant, when it is normally supposed to be flowing. This wasn't helping the water level either. I called the City to come and look at the ditch, since it was them who required it to be installed. While they couldn't dispute that it was having an effect on the water table, the ditch itself wasn't directly causing the flooding in the basement. They were supposed to go back and look at the ditch yesterday and possibly clean it out a bit to get things flowing again. I haven't heard back from them, but will have to keep an eye out and see if the ditch gets better.

I called my Dad, who is in Boston with my brother at the diabetic clinic this week. I explained how the water was coming in. Supposedly double drain tile was installed when my house was built, but as anyone who watches Holmes on Homes knows, who knows if that is actually true. Dad recommended a sump pump as my cheapest, easiest, and likely best solution to prevent that from happening again. Once he's back I will have to get his help to get one installed.

I rushed around and got everything up onto plastic as best I could that night, but I now have some empty, soggy cardboard boxes hanging around. I plan on investing in some big plastic Rubbermaid totes to replace the large cardboard boxes I was using. I was also lucky that John had installed a door for me over the holidays. It had been lying on its side on the floor, and may have been damaged if it hadn't gotten installed.

I'm worried about finishing my basement though. Thankfully I had not invested in refinishing any more of the basement yet. I would like to get my bathroom finished next, and that would have a ceramic tile floor, so not a big deal if I had to deal with water again. The hard part is thinking about finishing the rest of the flooring. I had no plans anytime soon to put anything down in there, but it makes me wonder if I ever want take that risk. Realistically, after the sump pump is installed and working, the chances of my having another flood are reduced. There is always a risk of a crack in the cement, but you never know if that will occur in any home.

So it's been a stressful week for me. I've had no success changing a circuit board on my mother's hard drive, so all of her data is lost (unless I want to pay $125 on eBay for the same model and hope it works). Now I have a basement that is again recovering from a flood. Someone reminded me yesterday that bad things happen in threes. I hope that third thing is the work-related problem I'm having today and not anything else personal. I've taken enough hits right now, thanks!

Playing ostrich

I bought a new PC a few months back. My old one has been sitting around on the floor, waiting for me to find the time to set it up and give to my mother. I finally decided that I should stop putting it off and get started on it this weekend. I'll ghost her hard drive, leaving her with a usable PC and then I can take her existing hard drive and pick away at the new install as I have time over the next few evenings.

I go over to my mom's house, which is empty because she's working this weekend. I try and boot into Ghost from her floppy, just to make sure it works. It doesn't start the first time, but comes right up again on the second try. Ok, I should be all set. I hook up the secondary hard drive, and turn on the PC. It will not boot. I won't boot from the floppy, the old hard drive, nothing. I put it back the way it was; it still wouldn't boot. Angered, I disconnected everything and trudged to work, where I could plug the two drives in and do the ghosting. Everything went fine while at work.

I returned to my mom's house, hoping to be able to plug the drive in and have the PC boot up. Still no luck. Great, this means I have to spend the weekend totally setting up her PC so she has something to use. Not how I'd planned to spend my weekend, so I was a bit cranky about that. I spent last night installing XP, SP2, and the 68 updates after that. Then I imaged the new install so that the next time I had to do this, I wouldn't have to go back so far. When all of that was complete, I called it a night.

I got up this morning and turned on the PC, aiming to get the programs installed and the data moved over onto the new hard drive from the old. I started by installing anti-virus. This is the part where things take a big nose-dive.

I am sitting here, watching the status bar for the install, and all of a sudden I hear a noise that sounds like "pewwwwwwww" and the distinct smell of smoke. What in hell was that? The PC was still going, so it couldn't be the power supply. The install was still running, so it wasn't the hard drive. I walked around and started sniffing the PC, trying to figure out where the smell was coming from. Couldn't see it right away. I walked back around to the PC, where an error message had popped up. "Write delay error on D:". Oh crap. That was the ghosted drive that just went up in smoke, the one with all of her data on it. There are no other backups.

Irony: the model name of the drive that burned is "Fireball".

Now I have to tell my mother that she has lost all of her data, and though it wasn't exactly my fault, she had entrusted it to me. I'd like to stick my head in the sand right about now.