never knows best...

dry as toast

My not much of a spending spree: Hanns.G 19" LCD monitor (they're the same cool company that makes the cheesy sports/fruit shaped/"themed" monitors, plus they have a store in San Francisco); 3 Threadless t-shirts (to channel my inner indie/artsy self); and a DJ Shadow CD (in anticipation of his new material get his old stuff?).

[edit]:
Actually the models that Hanspree (Hanns.G other brand) sells are very reminiscent of the stuff me/Ian/Will saw at Jan 2005 CES except in LCD form instead of CRTs. My picture from back then:

Spirit points... I got more of them...

I dunno, I'm still very torn over them, and they just end up hanging over head. I somewhat don't want to get them because there's nothing I want to redeem from the "spirit points" catalog. On the other hand any extra compensation is much appreciated (preferably cash or if not cash then at least stock). Overall I'm left with something I don't really know what to do with and something that leads to some light hearted/friendly jabs from coworkers (I think I suck up almost all the allocated spirit points that can be given to my team).

It doesn't help that the gazillions of them that I have accumulated over the years are near worthless (well ~$600 depending on what I get).

Meow meow meow meow...

My accomplishment for the day: somewhat recovering my Outlook PST files.

My notebook's hard drive is filled with bad sectors (hmmm... not sure where those came from), luckily the only files of note that seem to have corrupt sections were my current and archive email files. The odds were not in their favor (being ~750 MB each didn't help either). So the tech support guy tells me to try to back up my stuff, and he'll get me a new hard drive. The other problem with the email files is that they're too large to keep on my network share store, so using the automated backup services is my only hope. Too bad they balk at my bad sector riddled PST files.

In comes searching around on the internet for Unix data recovery tools. I find and compile GNU ddrescue (after installing Cygwin gcc and applying patches mentioned in a mailing list thread) and happily let it churn through my email, which has created nice backup'able files.

Come tomorrow when the new hard drive is in hand, hopefully things will recover more easily than they were to backup.

EDIT: Turns out it wasn't backup'able. I guess writing more data to a dying hard drive isn't as failsafe as I thought. So, I'm copying them over to my exteranl hard drive now with ddrescue now and trying to fix them as best as I can with scanpst.

Sony launched the mylo today. It seems pretty interesting to me though I would have preferred if it had a larger screen a la the Nokia 770. I sure hope that when it comes out, people feel the device is responsive (unlike the 770) and that the browser is able to support heavily Flash-based sites (i.e. YouTube and other stuff). Also it seems like a nice win for Opera overall. They have the internet tablet market all tied up... well other than PDAs.

Not a good weekend for my car... I noticed Sunday morning that my front driver side bumper was scratched up pretty badly, luckily the damage was pretty low on the bumper and not too large of an area, unluckily it was pretty scrathed up (some cracked/peeling paint). So I think to myself: I don't remember seeing that before, and I hope it wasn't from the carwash (I went through an auto carwash on Saturday night), and damn it's probably from some the car that was parked in front of me, and I hate Berkeley street parking, and aww well tough bananas.

Zoom to today, I'm usefully spending my time at work researching how I can get rid of the scratches and decide I'll go to the auto parts store later today to try to pick up some supplies. I get the 3M stuff that was recommended a couple of times on tech forums to buff it out and some Mother's wax to help seal it afterwards. After I finish buffing away and clearing up most of the scratches (can't do much about the missing paint), I check over my car and notice that I have a scratch running from my front passenger headlight to half-way to the front door. Crap! I got keyed too!!? Pissed off I try buffing some more and applying some wax, but it looks about the same. I guess I'll try an iterative process and try to buff it out over the week.

My sleep habits this week have been totally out of whack mostly due to my cold (which I'm happily now mostly recovered from). Before, I'd usually stay up to 11:30 or so (usually falling asleep in the middle of the Daily Show), now I end up staying up until 12:30 regularly before deciding I should try to sleep. And then once I do get in bed my feet/hands feel clammy and I can't sleep because the rest of my body feels hot/feverish (like I said I had a cold).

Worst of all was Monday night. After working from home that day, I picked up some Aleve Cold & Sinus to hopefully clear up my nose and fever at Target. Before, my standard cold relief medicine was Sudafed Severe Cold, but since Aleve's cheaper and has higher doses, I went with it. I thought all was swell, and I fell asleep watching the Daily Show as usual. But then I woke up at suddenly at 1 AM, and decide it was an OK time to kick off some data restore jobs for work. So I did that and then tried to go back to sleep. And couldn't go back to sleep. I ended up staying up until 5, doing a mixture of watching TV and listening to NPR.

Of course I've already found that not sleeping a lot doesn't affect my energy too much (my Berkeley years definitely desensitized me to that), but I still miss the sense of refreshness that I have for 5 seconds as my alarm wakes me up and the relaxing parts of sleep. And given the choice I'd rather sleep than watch late night TV/listen to early runs of NPR's Morning Edition.