Its Spring time here in Houston, and I am back after a long silence :).. Its almost more than two months since i ‘wrote’ a post I guess.
Well, the last couple of months have been pretty hectic on the work front. Things are settling down slowly. (I think! & hope). Lets see. Fingers crossed. … Hopefully, you should soon see some regular posts back on this blog!
Well, nothing much has changed over the past few months, pretty much the same work schedule. No major travels…except that we had been on a 4 day road trip to Fredericksburg (Texas) & Dallas back in December ‘06 during the Christmas holidays. . so I have a lots of posts/pics that have been backlogged (including the Las Vegas trip snaps!). I hope i would be able to clear all the backlogs soon :)
Well, having said above, I must tell you all that I am not totally off the internet :) I am very much connected. Thanks to Google Reader, I am still actively tracking all the blogs that I used to read and follow (and a lot more!). Also, Google Reader is my primary feed reader now!. Bloglines is out for me! And Google Reader gets better by the day! The only thing that I would like to see on Google Reader is a search feature to search contents my subscribed feeds (or starred/shared posts). Surprising that a ’search’ powerhouse like Google doesn’t offer ’search’ feature natively! (160GB Seagate Portable Hard drive (USB powered) - got it from newegg.com
2. 750GB Seagate External Drive (USB 2.0 + FireWire + external power) - (Just ordered - yet to arrive!)
3. Canon Digital Rebel XTi -400D (Sold my old Canon Digital Rebel 300D on eBay!)
4. EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Telephoto Zoom (Sold my old 75-300mm lens on eBay)
5. 3 GB of CF cards (2 GB - Sandisk Ultra II & 1 GB - Lexar Platinum)
6. Garmin Nuvi 360 - GPS - Use this a lot. In fact we were totally dependent on this on our last road trips!
Well, I must say that I got pretty good deals on all of the gadgets! But the sad part is, I haven’t had lot of time to play around with most of the above gadgets :(
Well, next post coming up soon!
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March 22nd, 2007 at 12:16pm
While I was working on the laptop on Saturday night, all of a sudden, the laptop stopped responding. A minute later, I got to see the dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen of Death).
For me it was pretty much routine to see the BSOD, and I thought to myself..”yet another Microsoft/driver problem”… but I was wrong. I rebooted the laptop, and found that the system wasn’t booting up. Further investigation showed that the hard-disk wasn’t detected in the BIOS itself :(. Aaahhhhrrrrrr………
What a bad time for the HDD to crash. I didn’t have a boot disk or any alternative media with which I could boot. :( So, the entire Sunday, was without a computer. Somehow spent the day seeing some (stupid) TV channels ….etc.
Monday.. i.e., today took the laptop to the office, and they said that its totally dead, and all the data is gone. .. they could try sending it to some external agencies to recover the data, but its gonna cost quite a bit. Luckily, there wasn’t any major data loss.
So, spent most of the day today setting up the software and environment that I would need for my day to day work…and its not fully over yet.
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February 28th, 2006 at 09:27am
Bought a new hard disk and a webcam today!
I already have a 160 GB Maxtor hard disk, but I always wanted a second hard disk after I lost my previous hard disk in an ant attack. So, bought a 80 GB Seagate hard disk - 7200 RPM. Yet to install it. The idea is to make my Maxtor hard disk a pure storage volume and use this new one as a system disk. Also, it would be very convenient for me to plug out the 160GB maxtor whenever I want to! Moving data/music/videos etc would be much easier :)
I paid Rs. 2650 for the hard disk. (A 40 GB hard disk was available for Rs. 2350). Bought it from my local vendor. What say?
Also bought a Intex webcam. Its has a pretty decent feature set. Here are the key features…
- 350,000 pixels resolution(max. 500,000 pixels), the frame rate up to 30 fps
- 3X digital zoom function
- Adjustable lens for accurate image shooting
- Night view function without any daylight
- Automatically controls the brightness of night lights
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Cost : Rs. 900. There was Logitech available too, and I was all set to buy it, but the vendor suggested that this has got better features and that he as got better feedback about Intex from the users. Let me see how good it is. Else, I think I will ask him for a replacement. BTW, logitech was priced at around Rs. 1100. Intex has some lights (6 LEDs), which are automatically lit up in low light conditions and are pretty bright.
Next I need to install Skype 2, which is out of beta and has video support!
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January 7th, 2006 at 04:51pm
The ants needed some hard disk space, and so, my hard disk was attacked by red ants last Friday.
Result : Hard disk conked off.
For the past couple of days, I could see some ants on my table. But never thought that they would get into the machine and take shelter inside the hard disk.
Everything was working fine till Friday morning. When i switched on my machine Friday night, the boot sequence was kind of abnormal. Scan-disk came up, and reported that some parts of my HDD weren’t readable, and was kind of stuck. Then I rebooted my machine, skipped scandisk, and managed to boot into windows. But it took around 30 mins to boot into windows. Damn slow. Knew something was wrong with the HDD. Rebooted again, and went into BIOS setup to detect HDD. In BIOS, things were behaving in a very unpredictable fashion. BIOS would detect the HDD sometimes and sometimes, on boot, i would get the message ‘Primary master failed’ etc. So, I decided to open up the PC and see whats up inside. Only to find that there were lot of ants right inside the HDD. :(
I have 2 HDD. Seagate (40 GB) and Maxtor(160GB). Both are stacked one about the other inside the cabinet. The ants were between these two HDD. Both the HDD’s were effected. But my primary HDD - Seagate was kind of damaged - may be bcoz of a short circuit. I immediately cleared off most of the ants that were outside. But there were ants inside too. i.e., between the PCB on the HDD and the sealed section of the HDD.
Took the hard disk /machine to the local vendor on Saturday, opened up the PCB of the HDD, cleared it. But the damage was already done to Primary HDD. :(.
Impact : Immediate and major impact was, lost the windows installation and some data. But nothing major that i can remember. So, i had to start from scrape on the other HDD. I am done installing all the basic stuff needed for day to day use.
Recovery : Luckily, the failed HDD (Seagate), was recognized by the BIOS. But there weren’t any partitions. I guess the partition table was damaged. Now, the recovery is on. I have managed to recover 3 out of the 4 partitions, and attempts are on to recover the last partition too. Some data is gone. But thats nothing to be worried about.
Reason : Not very sure what the reason is, but this is what my wild guess is. Its rainy season now, and is pretty cold outside. I keep my PC on for the whole night most of the days, and as a result, the HDD area is kind of Hottest spot in our room/house! So, i guess the ants sensed the warmth, and decided to take shelter over here.
Need to do a full fledged pest-control of my room/home. Now, no antivirus software can prevent this :). Can they ?
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July 24th, 2005 at 01:43pm