Wednesday, March 7, 2007

The 2-day Process Of Recovering Data From a Windows XP Home NTFS Hard Drive

I received the dreaded phone call from my dad a few days back: Windows wouldn't boot. Little did I know, I was in for the big one this time.

I tried my standard tricks. I used the ninja-style [eight commands to repair Windows][eight], which usually fixes it, but this time it didn't fix it. I tried CHKDSK, and I was told that *"The drive has suffered from one or more unrecoverable errors."* Hmmm, that's a new one.

[eight]: http://www.short-media.com/review.php?r=313&p=1


Sunday, March 4, 2007

A Normal Cell Phone Ring: My Small Effort to Reduce the General Annoyance of Being Amongst The Unwashed Masses

I like lots of music. I like loud rock. I like country. I like mellow white-boy music. I like old jazz. I like 'experimental world music.' I like the Yoshida Brothers song with the shamisen from the Wii commercials. I even like classical music.

What I don't like, however, is super-low-bitrate pseudo-techno or 5 seconds of the latest Fergie song playing on repeat, sounding like it's coming from a 1920's-era AM radio. Unfortunately, those are the hideous noises that come out of 95% of cell phones out in public today.

Fortunately, I have a solution.