The Internet has become...

...a boring place. There's nothing new on the band blog as of late, so there's really no point in having an Internet connection. There are not even any decent news stories to follow.

So, to brighten up this dreary, lonely place, the next one who posts on this forum wins A NEW CAR!! Of course, I can never guarantee the state of this new car, but I can tell you that in some circles, it would be considered cool. :)

Anyhow, yeah, there's just been so little activity on here for the last few months and I'm just kind of wondering why. What's everyone up to? I know that school is dragging on, but there surely must be something of interest going on in someone's life.

Oh, I must share a fairly traumatic experience that happened to me recently, and if you learn something from it, more power to you. Okay, so last week, I was in my Database Administration class (CS3540.) We were discussing some of the finer points of backing up data in a corporate (or personal) environment. Well, I thought to myself that I hadn't backed up my schoolwork from this semester for a few weeks and it was high time I did something about that. So, I remoted in to my Windows computer at home and proceeded to back up all of this semester's work onto my Linux box, Persephone. After class got out, I headed back home to get ready for work only to find that the hard drive in my Windows computer was making a strange moaning noise. So, I tried to log in and it just froze up. I cycled power to the machine and it failed to boot. My hard disk had crashed. I took the hard drive out of the computer and replaced it with an old one I had lying around. That worked, but of course, it didn't have anything on it pertaining to my schoolwork. Fortunately for me, I had backed up all my work from this semester to Persephone and it was safe there. I took my hard drive down to PC Club in Riverdale where they told me that they would do what they could to recover my data (shy of cracking the case on the hard drive.) This was Thursday, I think. When Saturday came, they called me and told me that my data had been recovered and that I could come and pick up my new, larger hard disk with the recovered data. In all, I paid $154.xx to ge my stuff back. It was worth the cost, but I could have avoided the cost by properly backing up all of my data. So, the lesson I hope everyone learns from this is that if the stuff you have on your computer is important, BACK IT UP! And then, once you've backed it up, back up the backup. Be paranoid, but Don't Panic.

So, yeah, that was my not-so-fun week of learning the hard way about backups. Take it easy, y'all!