Confrontation

I have found that I lack the will/courage/nerve to confront practically anything in my life. It's very interesting. This trend goes to the extent that I have trouble even forming opinions about things. Or rather, I find most anything for which one could have an opinion to be agreeable to my liking and generally have to be shown otherwise.

Most of my opinions that I do form seem to center on the logic of the matter. I feel rather like Mr. Spock of Star Trek sometimes, recently. It doesn't really matter to me if I actually agree with some action/belief. But if there is a logic I can formulate around how the action came to be completed or the belief came to be believed, then I am OK with it, and I might even like it.

Farewell to a Hard Drive

A week ago, my computer's hard drive stopped booting. I ran out to Best Buy immediately and bought a new Western Digital Scorpio Hard Drive with 120 GB capacity(double the capacity of my ailing 60GB Hitachi Travelstar) and I loaded a fresh install of Ubuntu Edgy Eft on it. I happened to have backed up my data about 6 months ago, so I got my old stuff back immediately. But, as I have some mission critical data that was not backed up, I had to retrieve this data.

If you've never had this happen to you, it's quite nerve-wracking. As you may know, most all of my productive work takes place in coordination with my computer, and thus, a hard drive on that computer. If the hard drive dies, I must retrieve what's on it, because I've spent countless hours developing my projects and will reuse the resources from them in the future.

I took the drive to a computer repair shop that has been helpful before, and tends not to charge me anything. After a few days with them, they were not able to recover my data, since the drive would not boot. Oh crap, what was I going to do about this? A professional repair shop can't even get my hard drive to boot, so what hope do I have that won't cost me an arm and a leg? Oh well, at least they didn't charge me...

But, I had one trick up my sleeve yet! I read on the web about a certain technique of hard drive data recovery that involves placing the hard drive in the freezer for an arbitrary but significant amount of time. The principle behind it is that if some part in the hardware is out of alignment, the cold temperature will cause the metal to contract and possibly snap back into alignment.

So, having nothing to lose, I put the HDD in the freezer for an hour. No effect! I put it in again for three hours. Still nothing... Then I left it in the freezer for about twelve hours over night. When I tried it again, the motherboard wouldn't even recognize the hard drive!(until the drive warmed up again)

Well, that didn't work... But I remembered one comment I'd seen in reading forums about this freezing technique, and that one person had had success with the opposite technique: heating up the hard drive, thus causing the parts to expand. I have this little space heater that I use when it's cold. So I decided to give the heat idea a try. What I did was to put the heater on its back, so it pointed at the ceiling, then place the hard drive on top and put a towel over the whole thing. Then I plug in the heater and heat the hard drive for 3 minutes on each side. You have to be very careful and pick up the drive with a towel, because it's like touching a pot that's been on a stove.

So, after doing this, the hard drive got a little further! I couldn't believe it! It still didn't work, but it encouraged me to keep on trying to heat it up. After another round it actually tried to boot up! But then as it got cool it stopped working again. But after I heated the drive another time, I was able to get the drive to boot and look at all my data! I was able to then copy my most important stuff to my flash drive and upload the rest to a school server. I had to upload to the server because the drive stopped wanting to be written to after a few minutes of being booted up, and wouldn't mount my flash drive or my new hard drive. Occasionally I had to hold my computer over the space heater when it started to lock up again.

Hopefully this will help some people who are at their wits' end about recovering their hard drive :-)

Drew's Wedding

A week ago I served as my friend Drew Foerster's best man at his wedding in DC. Drew is the friend I've known the longest, since about 3rd grade.  Our birthdays are 4 days apart.
We never went to the same school, though we both participated in day camps during the summer through the rec & parks system in Howard County, MD.  In high school, Drew got me interested in Linguistics, in which I'm pursuing a PhD currently.  Drew is excellent with languages, having profficiencies in Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic, and soon Armenian ;-)  Currently, Drew serves in the Air Force teaching Mandarin to airmen in Nebraska.

He is a very good friend to me and he will also be my best man in my 
wedding as well, which is going to be on July 28th in Florida ^_^
  
Drew married an Armenian girl named Yeva who is very cute and sweet.  She is a piano student at Fresno State University, although I believe she has transferred to a university in Nebraska.

I have a couple pics from the ceremony for your gawkment.  The first is me walking with Drew's younger sister Ellen.  The second is Drew walking with his wife Yeva.  And yes, Drew's family has a height advantage on most of the world.

Wedding Plans!

Rachel and I have put together a wiki page for our wedding plans.  
What this means is, if you're involved in the planning of our wedding, 
or otherwise have something constructive to add, then you can freely edit our site :-)

We'll be working on it continuously until the wedding day, and probably afterwards, so
bookmark the page and make sure to check back regularly :-)

Video of Engagement

Rachel and I put together a documentary of our engagement.  
Hope you enjoy it! 

My favorite band right now is Page France.  They have a great innocence to their sound, and the lyrical composition of Michael Nau is genius.  They love to use objects from nature as symbols and occasionally personify them.  They love to use circus analogies. They love to talk about playing instruments, clapping hands, and singing.  The lyrical style is what one might call "random", but they're all well-constructed metaphors.  They use xylophone and organ and a strummy accoustic guitar extensively and bass and drums and electric guitar sparingly.  The female vocals of Whitney McGraw are inserted subtly and give the music the air of a children's song.

Oooo, and they seem to be coming to Champaign in March ^_^

I got engaged!

On Christmas Eve, I got engaged to a lovely girl named Rachel Drum.  
She writes about it in her blog. I took Rachel to Natural Bridge State Park in Kentucky, while we were visiting my Dad's side of the family in Lexington.  I gave to her a Gelin Abaci tension ring holding a white sapphire stone.

We will get married in late July or early August, likely somewhere on the east coast.  

Halfway Done!

I'm halfway done with my PhD program! Yay!  
A week ago I deposited my qualifying papers. Now, I just have to defend my papers next semester, and if I pass, I get 
a Master's degree in Linguistics. Whew. 
I just graded my last HW set, so I'm completely done with the semester.

I'm going to Lexington, Kentucky, where I will spend Christmas with my girl Rachel and my Dad's side of the family. We stay at my Uncle Norb's, who with my Aunt Tammie are great hosts to Rachel and me. I love staying there.  

I'm also going to visit Nana and Aunt Debra in the Fort Lauderdale, Florida area, for the New Year's time.  I'm looking forward to being in a tropical climate in the winter.