Azalea's from the Rally Site
Next to the house on the farm where the rally was held was a truly gorgeous Azalea bush, probably 6 feet tall and fully 8 feet wide, it was covered in blooms. This image was shot with my Panasonic Lumix.
Uh, well, oops?!?!
So well, I broke it. It being everything. You see the weekend before last, I left town to go camping at a scooter rally (Joe Mama's Rally, the Atlanta based Terminal Scooter Clubs first rally). This meant 3 days away from the laptop (good thing). Unfortunately, upon my return, it wouldn't boot. A little diagnosis, and it turns out that the hard drive had failed. This isn't the first time that disk has failed, both times prior it had failed, it had done so at about the same percentage of full. Strange, but so be it. So I wiped the disk and prepared to restore from my backup, which I am religious about, I use both a Time Machine backup for hourly and daily, with a twice weekly Backup for a network attached disk array.
Unfortunately, the Maxtor external HD that I use for the Time Machine backup decided to ALSO fail, apparently it had issues prior, but they didn't show up when the drive sat on the shelf over my desk, but when I moved it (it was not dropped and it was powered off and unplugged), it broke something, because the drive is now unreadable. So I had to fall back to the network attached storage restore. It took nearly 3 days to recover the data onto a hard disk, but further analysis of the laptop proved that it needed a new hard disk, so Friday, it went winging off to Apple for a new hard disk.
Fortunately, I have a couple of other machines to fall back to, but I do appear to have lost a large chunk of my pictures, and a small set of my documents. Fortunately, it doesn't appear that anything truly critical is gone.
I did however take the opportunity to clean some things up. One of those things was to rearrange some things here on the blog. I've archived the old posts by year, and started bringing some of the old posts from the .mac blog over here into the archives. The downside, I may have broken the old comments, and I can almost promise that the RSS Feeds are going to show new things that aren't new.
Sorry bout that.
On the upside, the Rally was phenomenal with the sole exception of one of the vintage bikes soft seizing at 40+ mph on the ride out. Faith, who had never dealt with a seize before forgot to grab the clutch in her panic, but she kept the bike upright for nearly 100 feet before it finally bucked her. She's alright, a few bumps and bruises, but nothing broken, and the bike is very repairable. She even stayed for the rally after a quick trip to the hospital for a good check out.
In addition the weather is perking up, and the entire area is abuzz with bikes on the roads, including a very large number of new riders. How bad is the new rider situation? Apparently the MSF classes are filling so fast that they are booked within days of being posted as available. I've talked to 3 new riders that are struggling to get the class scheduled :(.