For a few days posted a few pics to keep you guys happy.

It says 3:10 left that’s how long it’s going to take to recover my files. On Tuesday I uninstalled a buch of programs from my computer. On Wedensday I turned it back on and was greeted with the fucking blue screen of death. Despair washed over me, I tried boot disks and recovery consoles but nothing worked. I remembered that all of the important data all of my pictures from the past 2 years were on the RAID partition and were still safe even if the boot disk was corrupt.
So my quest began. I got a copy of XP and installed it. Everything went smoothly except one god damn fucking issue. XP didn’t recognize the RAID controller, the manufacturers drivers were woefulyy out of date. Even though they claimed they had some XP drivers they didn’t work at all even when I re-install XP from scratch with them. Out of desperation I thought of another solution: Linux. I could install Linux and use the Linux RAID driver to get to the data and copy it onto an NTFS USB drive. I downloaded the 4 disk Fedora core. I started the install and it took 175 minutes. 2 reboots later my BIOS happily reported that it couldn’t find an OS. WTF, I just installed Linux, I tried a rescue CD next and while I could see the boot disk the fucking RAID controller still didn’t work. I tried to install XP again with no hope OS still not found.
Thankfully a friend lent me his W2K cd and I had high hopes for it until it said it was only an upgrade cd and it needed to see either a previous installation or an NT/Win98 CD before it would do the upgrade. Can I just kill someone at this point ? I mean it’s been 3 days that I’ve been working on this non stop. The fucking data is there, it’s safe I just can’t get to it.
At the last second I realized that I had a recovery CD that came with my e-machine which I bought about 4 years ago and sure enough the W2K installation was happy with it. But the disk still wouldn’t boot and it was taking forever.
I assumed the boot disk had gone bad and used another disk that I had lying around, still no luck. A killing spree at this point would have been appropriate. As a last resort I used a different CD rom and everything speeded up by a factor of 10. It seemd that the CD rom was borken (yes borken) but not in a way that would be easily noticeable. I have had bad luck with CD burners in the past that’s why I invested in a Sony. Thanks Sony for fucking me over yet again.
Finally I had a working W2K installtion, the RAID drivers worked I could see my data but windows would have nothing to do with since it was not part of its partition table.
god fucking damn it. I think I broke something on the table this time. One last effort with with a file recovery tool and voila at 12:10 am 1.23 of 7.45 gigs has been recovered and the rest are on their way.
Moral of the story no one gives a shit about IDE on board RAID controllers. NO ONE, not even the fucking Linux people. The damn Linux drivers for this controller were written with RH 6.1 in mind.
But that’s ok I am not mad, at least I didn’t have to take the disks apart platter by platter and copy the data with a pencil.

of these and I have plans for it. They involve some garlic and a non stick pan.

My comp is almost fixed, do you want to know the gorey details ? The depths I had to go to get it working again, no you don’t. So I’ll just say all the important data was backed up on a set of RAID disks and XP doesn’t recognize the RAID controller so much for my backup. What are the odds that the Taiwanese manufacturer will respond to my question ?

So what does losing all of my programs mean ? Not that much really except that now I have to manually check every blog before I used Maxthon (MYIE2) to open all of the blogs at once and I could quickly go through and browse. Not everyone has an RSS feed and I am not a big fan of RSS/atom/flavor of the day anyways.

Cutting TV out of my life was pretty traumatical, I am still slowly recovering, for part of the day I was without TV and internet thank god I had a book I have no idea how I could have survived otherwise.

There’s a gentle mist falling on LA tonight, it’s just warm enough to make it comfortable to walk under. If you are in LA you should go out and take a walk one of the few times you can do that in LA.

In other news I have more gmail invites let me know if you want them.

I tried to make up for the lack of TV with online poker and I think I angered God or something. I went on a ridiculous losing streak which means I have only about $3 left in my account. Ok so maybe God doesn’t want me play poker I’ll just work on the blog right ? wrong. Now I get the blue screen of death, something to do with the hard drive. So I sit down to watch the last game of the day Raiders vs. Broncos and the TV remote is out of batteries.
I hear the message God, no need to hit me with lightening. I’ll get off my ass now before a swarm of locusts rains down.

I have to stop playing K 4 off suit, I don’t know why I think that’s my lucky hand, it never wins. Lost 3 big hands, a Q flush to an A flush. My 2 of a kind to a straight and I forgot how I lost the last one. TV sucks without a tivo

My hands are shaking and I woke up in a cold sweat. My fingers keep twitching and searching for the control I know is not there. Yesterday I canceled Tivo, Cable and Greencine.
This is worse than when I quit smoking, and it just makes the addiction to TV even more obvious. Last Saturday after being on the road all week long I got up at 9 am and watched all of ths shows that I had missed until about 11pm. As you can tell I am replacing the TV with blogging and poker. After 2 hours on the tables and a $20 buy in tournement later (I came in 881 out of 1885) I felt a bit better. Overall I am still down $40 and yes I know Vietnamese and Iranians are the two groups most likely to play poker. Afterall you see Amir, Farzad and other Iranians play at the top tournements. By the way where are the ladies ? I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Iranian girl playing poker. Come on ladies I am sure you can all duke it out with the men. crap now I am rambling, this is not good. I’ll go play with the style of blog now.

I waited before doing this hoping that the people writing those blogs would come back, but it looks like APGIC, Reza, Tina and Belle are not coming back
So I’ll be adding a few new blogs to the site, Negar in Texas, Dot, Bellow and some other ones I’ve been reading.
Weird news:
This is my excuse too.
Only in Hong Kong.
Barney is hardcore.
Japan is just weird.
There is hope.
Again Japan is weird.
Dead Teddy.
New Prince of Persia game.