TestDisk

2012-11-11, 3:26 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Tech

I guess I was overdue for doing something monumentally stupid and sloppy, because Friday night I went to format an external 1TB hard drive and accidentally formatted my internal one instead -- the one with Windows on it.

Now, after a moment's panic, I realized that I didn't have anything vital and irreplaceable on there -- I had backups of my resume, my password wallet, things like that. I hadn't backed up my financial spreadsheets or work search log in a couple weeks, but I could reconstruct those if I absolutely had to from my bank statements and E-Mails. And I had a Mass Effect 2 save that was maybe an hour farther along than my backup.

So, nothing life-or-death. But I'd still just as soon not have to take the time to reinstall Win7, reinstall Win8, reconstruct my spreadsheets, and replay that last hour of ME2 if I could avoid it. And I knew it was just a quick format, so my data should all still be intact on the drive -- it was just a matter of getting to it.

I was booted to OSX at the time, and the first piece of recovery software I found was EaseUS. It was a free trial for a $90 piece of software. Now, I knew going in that there was no way my lost data was worth $90 to me, but I figured I'd see how far I'd get with it.

Not fucking very.

You'd think a trial for a $90 piece of software would be designed to make you think the software was worth $90. Instead the fucker just kept hanging -- I might, might get as far as it displaying all my disks and partitions, but after that (or, just as frequently, before that) it would just lock up, static unresponsive window, Spinning Beach Ball of Death, all that shit.

So then I stumbled upon TestDisk. I missed the part where it said there was an OSX version, so I rebooted to Linux to see if I could install it.

And found that my OpenSUSE boot had somehow become hosed too. (I would later find out that this was not a coincidence and that OpenSUSE actually goes into Emergency Boot Mode if it fails to load a filesystem in its fstab. I did not consider this at the time because (1) I was very tired and (2) Linux failing to boot because it can't mount a Windows drive is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard.)

But fortunately I still have my old Kubuntu drive onhand, and it was not only able to boot, but it already had TestDisk installed, with no worrying about having to fuck with repos. I think it may even be part of the basic Ubuntu installation.

Now, there's a lovely step-by-step guide at the TestDisk site called Recovery of Reformatted Partition.

The bad news: I spent yesterday trying to recover the drive and never did get it to work, and I'm finally giving up the ghost because it's just not worth fucking with it any longer. But I figured I'd put this up here just in case you have better luck with it than I did. I had a hard time, in my initial search, finding a good listing of Linux software to use to try and recover an NTFS partition that has accidentally been reformatted. Maybe somebody will stumble across this page in a similar search someday, and find TestDisk as a result.

Again, it didn't work for me -- but it looks like a solid piece of software, and it's worth a shot. (Unlike EaseUS, which is a piece of crap you should not waste your time with.) Good luck.

Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue

2012-11-10, 10:39 pm
Categories: Music

Appleton, 1969. Soundboard recording, via YourArf. My fiancée; just came into the room and described it as "like Spike Jones on acid"; I doubt she is the first or last person to describe Zappa that way.

Tron Lives

2012-11-09, 9:35 pm
Categories: Cartoons, Stream of Consciousness

Tron: Uprising is like an amalgamation of all my favorite cartoons from the 1990's.

Like Batman Beyond, it's the story of a familiar character, a shadow of his former self but still formidable, training a brash young successor.

Like Sonic the Hedgehog, it's the story of a small group of rebels waging an asymmetric war against a ubiquitous technocratic dictatorship.

And like Beast Wars, it uses the fact that its characters aren't actually human as an end run around standards and practices in order to be the most violent children's cartoon on television.

Seriously, it turns out that if you change "kill" to "de-res" and change blood to little blue cubes, you can show a dude with half his face cut off and the outline of an eyelid still blinking over an empty eyesocket. Game of Thrones wasn't that graphic when Tyrion took an axe to the face.

Also: Fred Tatasciore's impression of Jeff Bridges is uncanny.

Anyway, in case you haven't caught the show yet, here's the first episode (which thetvdb classifies as a "special" instead of the first episode, thus offsetting the numbering of every single episode by one -- so thanks for that, thetvdb). It's hosted on the official Disney XD channel, so that means it's not liable to be taken down any time soon, but also means it's probably region-locked -- sorry 'bout that.

Dreamed I Was an Eskimo

2012-11-08, 9:49 pm
Categories: Music

Yellow Snow Suite -- that's Yellow Snow and St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast -- in Passaic, NJ, 1978.

Yet another upload by tomtiddler1.

Routine

2012-11-08, 7:32 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Work

If there's one thing unemployment does, it's fuck with your routine.

When I was working it was pretty well set -- get up at 6 AM, shower, pour coffee and water, grab a frozen lunch and a breakfast bar, go to work for eight hours, come home, work out.

In theory, my current schedule should be something like get up at 8 AM, pour coffee, look for work, eat breakfast, shower, look for work some more, work out. But as you might expect, the order of these things tends to vary a bit.

Slept until 10 this morning, then looked for work until about noon. Then, as I was cooking breakfast, I got a call from my agency; they told me I didn't get the last job but there's a new one open -- a new one that requires a whole lot of paperwork.

So then I spent maybe 3 hours putting together my college transcript and letters of recommendation and filling out a buggy-ass PDF form that doesn't show text in half the fields after it's entered.

Then I worked out.

And only then -- around 4 PM -- did I finally get to shower.

I don't want to make a habit of that. Thing is, I'm not likely to make a habit of much of anything -- every day is different, and it's impossible to maintain a consistent schedule the way I did when I had a set place to be for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

Tomorrow? Who knows.

More Parallel-Universe Politics

2012-11-07, 10:36 am
Categories: Politics, Stream of Consciousness

You know, I got to thinking last night.

If John McCain had been elected in '08, Jan Brewer would never have become governor. SB1070 would have been vetoed.

And a McCain Justice Department sure as hell would not have dropped an investigation into Joe Arpaio right before the damn 2012 election.

I'm beginning to see why candidates almost always win their home states: sure, I still think McCain would have been a terrible choice for the country...but I'm beginning to think Arizona really would have been in much better shape if he were President.

Then again, Russell Pearce would probably still be Senate President. So there's that.

Hey Karl Rove?

2012-11-06, 9:41 pm
Categories: Politics, Stream of Consciousness

My brother asked me the other night if I was voting for Goldman or Sachs.

That is largely how I feel about this race and about Obama. (I wound up going Stein, BTW.) But on the whole he's the lesser evil, and this is a victory for a number of reasons -- gay rights, taxation, healthcare, and, perhaps most importantly:

A big Fuck You to Karl Rove, Shel Adelson, Citizens United, SuperPACs, and all the plutocrats' best efforts to buy this election.

Sure, tomorrow we're back to gridlock, drone strikes, warrantless domestic surveillance, mass unemployment, high gas prices, impending sequestration, and a vanishing middle class. But tonight? Maybe I'll sleep a little bit better than those fatcats.

And then go back to looking for work while they count their money. But hey, I'll take what I can get.

More Zappa on Politics

2012-11-06, 8:47 pm
Categories: Movies, Music, Politics

This'll probably be the last one of these for awhile.

Per uploader dannen59, "It's from an Austrian documentary called "Das Beste von Frank Zappa - 20 Jahre Extravaganza 1969-1989"."

In a parallel universe somewhere, the 1992 election featured Bush, Clinton, Perot, Zappa, and Nader. A man can dream...