doubting thom

Tomorrow we’ll heading up to Baltimore for at least part of the day. My friend Sheldon is judging at the (Magic: The Gathering) US Nationals there this weekend, and Jeff and I are driving up to see the live-action “Game of the Year” and then have dinner with Sheldon and his wife Gretchyn afterwards.

We’re planning to visit the intriguing American Visionary Art Museum, which has long been on my list of Baltimore to-dos, and the four of us are planning to have dinner in the museum’s Joy American cafe later that night. We might also visit the Baltimore Museum of Art or The Walters Art Museum. We went to an Orioles game and to the National Aquarium around this time last year, when my mom and nephew were visiting. Are there other things in Baltimore we should try not to miss on tomorrow’s day trip? While I definitely plan to go to the Visionary Art Museum, the other museums potentially could be set aside for a later visit, or foregone entirely, if there were something really cool we should see or do.

On the home PC front, things are looking even better. I had reported that my data drive was fine, and that only the OS drive had failed. Of course, it turns out that there’s valuable data on that latter drive as well, including a year’s worth of Outlook email, as a start, before I switched over to Gmail as my primary mail service, as well as software license keys and installers. Commercial drive recovery services, though, start at several hundred dollars for small-capacity drives, and go up to the thousands to recover drives that still are smaller in capacity than mine, so that wasn’t really an option; the data was important, but not worth thousands of dollars.

Last night, though, after trying a couple of freeware data recovery tools that weren’t able to recover any data from my damaged drive, I came across and downloaded a demo version of a commercial tool, Stellar Phoenix, and on the basis of its preliminary scan (the demo will show you everything it thinks it can recover, but won’t actually do any recovery) and the reviews and testimonials I’d read, decided to chance the $100 on the software.

And it looks like that investment paid off, as already I’ve been able to recover the most critical information from the damaged drive. Without it, there are a couple of applications I might have had to repurchase, because I no longer had their license keys or proprietary installers, so I’ll recoup the cost of the software pretty much just on that basis alone.

Look out, A-, B- and C-list bloggers (One of the Kathy Griffins of the blogosphere, I’m D-list at best)… with the fame accorded me by the Huddersfield Daily Examiner, I may soon be climbing the ladder of success.

In an article last week entitled “Blogging is so popular because anyone can do it,” elf-reflection is (deprecatingly if humorously) invoked along with the blogs “Wholesale Pants Warehouse – everything’s coming up pants” and “Shamus O’Drunkahan Has Issues – I have issues, ok?” as examples of the thousands of blogs the author uncovered in his/her exploration of the meaning and popularity of blogging. Why, this is almost the best thing that’s happened to me as a blogger, much better than being quoted last year in that Podunk rag, The New York Times.

I hadn’t heard of Huddersfield, which turns out to be a town in West Yorkshire, U.K. not far from Leeds or Manchester, almost exactly halfway between Liverpool and Hull on the M62 motorway. Huddersfield obviously has a rich history: One of the web sites dedicated to the town records such important milestones as the November 1962 closing of the Lockwood Brewery, and the March 1974 official opening of the bus station “by the Mayor, Councillor Mernagh, despite the fact that it has not actually been completed.” Sadly, the new £15,000 St. Georges Square Fountain, also opened in 1974, was removed just two years later when the soft limestone of the fountain, which was “over 100 years old and stood in Venice for many years,” proved “unable to survive the Huddersfield climate.”

Saturday night Jeff and I were part of the end of an era among my circle of friends; for the past ten years my friends Paul and Eric have hosted a big outdoor bash at their house around the first weekend in August (with Eric’s birthday falling the last week of July, and Paul’s the first week in August, the party started out roughly as a joint birthday bash, though it had grown into a large, professionally catered, themed event), but they’d decided that this year’s would be the last.

I originally met Paul and Eric through the DC gay squaredancing group I used to dance with; they left the activity before I did, and moved on to the gay rodeo and a bowling league, so the party attendees tend to be from these various, not always intersecting circles. One of the things I’ve appreciated about the parties is that they’ve given me the opportunity to keep up with old squaredance friends I otherwise might not see.

I made it to all but one of the parties, missing only last year’s when my mom and nephew were visiting and we took them to Wolf Trap, getting back too late–and too tired–even to make an appearance.

This ending has made me a little retrospective; a lot has happened in the ten years I’ve known Paul and Eric and been attending their parties, and I tend to associate the parties with certain events or processes going on in my own life. It’s even been somewhat cyclical for me: I attended the first with my then-boyfriend Jay, but by the second we were in the midst of a break-up and by the third were no longer living together and I, in fact, had moved to an apartment very close to Paul and Eric. Most of the intervening parties saw me single, attending either with the boyfriend du jour or stag; five or six years back I even hooked up, at the party, with another friend of theirs. Two years ago, though, Jeff was my date, and it was around that time, in fact, that we had just really begun to acknowledge that our relationship had gotten serious. Last year we didn’t attend at all because we were together with my family, and this year we attended as a couple, solidly together and moving on with our own lives; had this not been the last year of the event, by this time next year we hope to be living on the West Coast anyway.

So there have been a lot of memories associated with these parties, a few painful but the overwhelming majority very positive, and while it’s a bittersweet ending, it seems fitting.

The new hard drive (250Gb!) arrived yesterday afternoon, so I spent the evening installing the drive and reinstalling the OS. Even with the new 3Mbps DSL upgrade, it took several hours to download and install all the necessary updates, patches, security fixes and utilities, so I haven’t started reinstalling my applications yet (except for the absolute necessities: Firefox, iTunes and a few antiviral and antimalware utilities).

After installing the new drive, I was able to confirm that my data drive was still intact and operating normally (yippee!), and I even was able to mount the old OS drive as a secondary drive; unfortunately, while all the folders appear at the root level of the drive, many of them aren’t accessible, showing zero bytes, including, of course, the only one I especially had hoped to recover, that containing all my application settings (and old Outlook mail, though I think I have most of that stored on the laptop).

With the new drive, at 250Gb, having slightly more capacity than the two old 120Gb drives combined, along with a spare 120Gb IDE drive (removed from a previous computer), which I’ve now put in an external enclosure, I’ll be able to store my OS and data on the new drive, toss the fragged drive, and still have two 120Gb drives to use for backup purposes; which I now intend to do–and also to keep a better eye on the event log for bad drive sectors before a drive reaches the point of complete failure–much more conscientiously.

And, since 1) it’s a good idea to reinstall the Windows OS every now and then anyway, to improve performance, 2) I didn’t have the catastrophic data loss that might have resulted, and 3) I’ve learned a valuable first-hand lesson about instituting better backup procedures, all things considered I made out ok, out only the cash for the new drive and enclosure and a tiny bit of data.

As Solarbird already has pointed out in a comment to the previous post, my LiveJournal mirror of this blog is back up and working. Now that I’ve incorporated my del.icio.us links and flickr photos into my feedburner feed, I’m no longer posting them directly to the blog and no longer need to run the reblog software that conflicted with the LJ crossposting, so today I re-enabled the latter.

Four days later I’m still without a PC, which is my primary excuse for not having posted since Friday (I have a very old laptop, which is fine for occasionally checking email, but much too slow and difficult to use for anything else). Friday night after work I went by Best Buy to see if they had a hard drive, but their selection only included a single SATA drive, and it was a Maxtor–the one that just failed was a Maxtor, and I wasn’t keen to replace it with another–and much more expensive than I knew I could find online. So Friday evening I placed an online order for a new drive, but too late for it to be shipped before Monday for Tuesday delivery. Tracking indicates that it arrived at Dulles this morning, so I’m hopeful it will be waiting for me at home today after work, and then I can begin the long process of reinstalling Windows and all my applications.

I was feeling very tired on Sunday, and went to bed just after 10–an unusually early hour for me–and woke up yesterday morning not feeling particularly well. Jeff told me that he’d decided not to go into work, but I went ahead and got up, thinking I would go. After walking around a few minutes, though, it was clear that I really wasn’t feeling well enough to go to work, so I called in to tell them I’d be staying home, which is just as well since about an hour later I was in the bathroom throwing up.

After that, I spent most of the day just relaxing; with no computer or internet to monopolize my time, I managed to complete two books already in progress as well as start and finish a third, catch up on some TiVo’ed programming, grab a couple of catnaps, play about half an hour of Katamari Damacy on the Playstation, and still get to bed at a reasonably early time.

This morning my stomach’s still feeling a little unsettled, but at lesat I’m not throwing up and I’m well enough to have come to work–it was probably just a short-lived bug we caught over the weekend. Now that I’m here, though, we’re having network and Exchange server problems. It’s always something, isn’t it?

Yesterday was a very frustrating day. It started as one of those work days where you’re not at all sure you even want to come back to the place the next day, and it ended with a hard drive failure on my home PC that looks to be particularly serious; not only do attempts to repair the drive fail, my Windows XP CD can’t even see the disk anymore even to diagnose it, much less to re-install the operating system.

My hope is that the seriousness might be at least partially mitigated, as I actually have two hard drives in this PC, one containing the OS, applications and preferences, with the other holding all my data. It’s possible, and at least at first glance seems likely, that only the former actually is hosed and that my data might actually still be fine, just not accessible at the moment while there’s no OS. Keep your fingers crossed and think happy thoughts on that regard.

While buying a new drive, and then reinstalling and reconfiguring XP and all my applications won’t be fun–there’s my weekend, pretty much–at least I might still have the majority of my data, my gigabytes of photos, digitized audio, personal files, etc., which would be a truly wonderful thing. In fact, I almost hate to mention that things might not be completely fucked up, out of fear that I’ll jinx it and my usual terrible luck will kick in to ensure that everything is irreversibly irretrievable. Still, one hopes.

We interrupt the cataloging of the weekend in New York to note that last night Jeff and I went to the Wolf Trap stop of the “Odd Man Out Tour” featuring Rufus Wainwright and Ben Folds with Ben Lee.

It was a pleasant evening, though a little warm, with the local heat advisory extending right up to the 8:00 concert start time. We were running about five minutes late, which meant that we–along with the many other cars arriving around the same time–were directed to park on the grass right near the park entrance since the outer parking lots were full. Jeff remarked that maybe we should come late more often.

There were a lot of high-school age kids there; I’d estimate that easily 80-90 percent of the crowd were under 25, and maybe half were under 21. Quite a few people left after Ben Folds’s set, though, leaving a dozen or so seats in the two rows immediately in front of us empty during Rufus’s, giving us a really great view. Cameras weren’t supposed to be brought in, so I had left mine at home, but so many flashes were going off around us that in the end I kind of wish I’d taken mine with me anyway.

One highlight of the evening was watching the sign language interpreters, especially to see how they translated the strong language and adult content of some of the material. Ben Folds remarked to his interpreter, near the end of his set, that she would have to “wash her hands” after one of his songs.

It was a long show, lasting about three hours, though of course there was a fair amount of downtime between each of the three musicians, as the stage was changed out. Regardless, Rufus gave a long and energetic performance, moving quickly from one song to the next in his set of twelve. While sister Martha no longer tours with him, now that she is launching a solo career of her own, another sister, Lucy Roche (half-sister, I think, the daughter of Suzzy Roche and Rufus’s father Loudon Wainwright III… boy those folksingers were/are an incestuous bunch), joined him onstage for a couple of songs.

Note: Jeff has posted Rufus’s set list from the evening on his blog.

Friday we got up early (6:30, yuk) to catch a 7:30 cab in order to make our 8:30 train. I was worried that it being rush hour we might get caught in traffic, and had considered changing the taxi reservation to 7:15. Of course, traffic was extraordinarily light, and we were at Union Station by 7:50. You never know, though, and I’d rather be early than miss the train.

The ride up was uneventful–no wild turkey incidents this time–and snoozing most of the way up, we pulled into Penn Station at 11:45, feeling like it had taken practically no time at all.

We made our way to Jere’s apartment, which we were subletting for the weekend. It’s a charming space, if a little hot, though the bedroom was nicely air-conditioned, ensuring we spent most of our time there. We gathered his mail, watered his plant, snooped around his bookshelves (and I’m green with envy over his near complete Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden and Encyclopedia Brown collections) and then headed off for a terrific Cuban lunch at the excellent Victor’s Café, where I had the Croquetas Corral con salsa Lulu, the Camarones borrachos con vegetales Chino Cubano, and Arroz con Leche, while Jeff had the Ensalata mixta con aquacate, mango, queso Criollo y tomate, the Ropa vieja al nido de viandes, and Flan. We both had a glass of sangria.

After a quick “disco nap” (we knew we were going to have a very late night) and shower we headed out to Broadway for the first of our three weekend musicals, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at Circle in the Square Theater, which was really terrific, T-E-R-R-I-F-I-C, terrific. We loved it.

After the show we headed down to the Village where we stopped in at a Starbucks to have frappucinos and share a tarragon chicken salad sandwich, and then we walked across the street to the Duplex, where Friday night features the “Mostly Sondheim” caberet, and where we had told some of our New York blogging acquaintances we could be found, for socializing. Mike and Jeff showed up, and we had a nice time up until conking out sometime between 2 and 2:30.

Throughout the day there’d been a growing tension between Jeff and me, and on the walk home from the subway we were able to address it more openly, at which point I realized that my pique had been based entirely on an incorrect assumption that was not simply wrong, but in fact was a full 180 degrees from the truth. Boy was I embarrassed, but I was also man enough to admit my mistake, and it felt like the experience made us even a little stronger.

[Ed.: Turns out that Jeff posted his entry about the weekend after all, around the same time I posted this one. I’ll probably still write about Saturday and Sunday, from my pov, but you can see his take on the weekend as well.]