August ends on a rosy note

August... Hot, new fridge, new phone, family visit, power outages, and did I mention hot?

Summer goes on and on

And on.

R.I.P. Maxtor One Touch III

My original external hard drive died. I had to take my desktop PC to the shop to have a virus removed and when I reconnected everything, the drive wasn't being recognized. Tried to hook it up to my laptop - no luck. I had stopped backing up to this drive years ago, but I occasionally went looking for an old photo and found it there. 

Took it to the repair guy and he couldn't get it to work either. "It's the controller", he said. "Maxtor went out of business after being sued for lost data." Wonderful. He said he could 'try' to open it up and rebuild something-something... a 35% chance of getting any data back. Since this was not critical data that would stop me in my tracks, I opted not to spend the money. If a particular photo was good enough, I had probably uploaded it to Pbase, I reasoned. Most of what was on the drive was also backed up on CDs. It's a pain in the arse to go through stacks of discs, but if I had to, I could.

Enter this photo, from December 2001:

One of my favorites. I managed to find the backup disc and copied it to my desktop. Now I need to get it onto my new 2TB external drive.  sigh

While I was at it, I brought this one over as well. Also from December 2001:

And now I want to book a vacay at the beach...