This n' that

[susandennis]

Work is slow again. Boring. But, I was entertaining myself piddling around on the computer when I got an email that my webcams were wonky.

I so appreciate anyone and everyone who goes to the trouble of letting me know. My Mom never let a webcam be broken for more than a minute and I forget to check so now they can go broken for days. Of course that may well be tree in the forest material now that I think about it...

One of my computers runs two of the webcams using two instances of the same software. This is not ideal but works a lot of the time. I don't know of any software 'built' to run more than one webcam but I wish I did. And, by 'run' I mean send a jpg via ftp every 30 seconds or so. I'm not looking for anything complicated.

But... I digress.

I twiddled with both webcams and pretty soon managed to blue screen the computer. And when it came up, Surprise!! Hard drive failure. Again. Sigh. When my brother insisted on two drives with RAID I thought it was overkill but fortuitously kept my lips zipped. Sure glad I did.

I'm pretty sure both drives are still covered by Western Digital warranty. I sent email to my bro.

--

My tooth pain is not really worse. It's a little more constant and a little more localized. I think I called the dentist at a very good time in the pain process. Hopefully. I spent some time last night conjuring on the worse case scenarios and the best case scenarios and trying to get in my mind a likelihood of what will happen. I do better in these kinds of situations if I'm not caught off guard.

--

Just heard from my brother and got the WD RMA thing underway for the hard drive. Turns out it was the one that was replaced a few months ago. Oh well. All is good.

--

I got a very adorable photo birth announcement from my nephew (my brother's oldest) yesterday. I am not generally taken by baby pictures but this one is cute and the announcement is nice and I appreciate his sending it. So I popped a teddy bear into the mail to her with a note welcoming her into the world. My brother's other son had a baby girl a few months ago. Wonder what the world will be like for these two little girls. And what fun to have a same sex cousin just your age. Kennedy Joanne and Laurana Juliet.

--

Lunch time.

Comments

[seattlejo.livejournal.com]

I hope that having a same age cousin is better then having a 2 years older cousin. I had huge rivalry with my cousins.

[aellia.livejournal.com]

You sound like me with the dentist thing.
I'm not afraid of any pain they may inflict though it's just that my mouth is such a personal place that I don't like anyone going in there if you know what I mean.
I like the look of your sunny room,today and I checked your temps,it's cooler that it's been here and suits you just fine?
xx

[susandennis]

Oh I'm ok if the dentist looks and he can even poke around with his fingers but for me, it's the pain. Once he brings out one of his Instruments Of Torture, I'm a goner. It's clear Fear of Pain.

And... yes! today's temperature is SusanDennis Perfect. And I am enjoying the heck out of it. It is fun to have the shades up and a bit of a breeze. Friday marks the halfway point for me - Summer wise. I think I can make it to Sept.

xx back at you!

[nezbitthecat.livejournal.com]

Most of my dealings with HD failure are with WD drives. They are a good company and I haven't had any trouble RMA with them. Wish their hardware was more reliable - they have been around long enough.

[susandennis]

I was just thinking that I have had three hard drive failures in my life. All WD and each time I didn't mind too much because their RMA process is so slick. But, maybe they would be better served by moving some of that QA over from their RMA process to their actual hardware!

On the up side, two of those failures were RAID drives - no harm no foul and the other was a pocket USB drive that had nothing on it. But, I do have to spend money on shipping so now that I'm remembering that, I'm losing some of my largess...

[howeird]

Kudos to bro on insisting on RAID. A mirrored drive is the best economically feasible backup IMHO. But a word about WD. I used to swear by them. My first BBS ran a WD hard drive 24/7 for 10 years and never crashed. But for the past 3 or so years, running a 4-disc RAID with matching WD drives, I had a failure almost every time I had to hard-boot the PC or it did a blue screen, and though WD has a painless online RMA procedure, I still lost half my data once when two of the four drives went south in the same 24-hour period. I have since switched to Seagate drives, and to a 2-disk mirrored array. I also keep a spare drive on hand because RMAs can take a while. Maxtor brand drives seem to fail even more often than WD.

[susandennis]

Spare drive is not a bad idea... thanks!

[shanynrose.livejournal.com]

My sister-in-law and her cousin had their first kids just hours apart. We call them "the twin cousins." They're not terribly close now because they're teenagers and boy/girl, but when they were little they had joint birthday parties and it was all cute.