Best and worst break ever

I had to come back to school last Monday since grad classes don't "break" during the undergrad break ... boooo. So to make a long story short, I've been doing a lot of compilers work/studying, and getting kinda frustrated ... hopefully I can clear some of my questions up today.

DSC03039 Originally uploaded by jschementi.

Anyone how knows me well knows I sometimes get upset at concerts ... because I wish I was up there on stage. Well, this past friday I was able to indulge a little bit of that and play an Open-Mic Night @ Clark! I played a bunch of Averi, Live, some of my own, and finished with a Stephen Lynch song ... yeah i know, haha. I also bought the guitar I'm playing in the picture the day before! I've been talking about buying that guitar for years, so I finally just did it. But yeah, after the show I hung out with Allison, Nadine, Maya, and the gang. "The scariest thing ever was being a New Yorker during the last world series!" Anyway, undergrad classes start today, I'm going to a class today @ 10am just "incase", there is no hot water, and I'm not dressed yet. Fun. Bye.

At home ...

So, A-term is over and I'm back at home ... but damn it's been a crazy time! First off, my computer is back! And now with daily backups ... oh joy! So I've been playing catch-up a little with school and work stuff, but overall not bad. So I finally broke down and bought myself a Flickr account. :) You can see my pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jschementi. I'm going to have them show on my website as well, but for the time being there you go! Also, we had our first party of the year ... and what is the theme you might ask? Black and White! Ah! But, it was really fun ... take a look at my pictures. I had a lot of fun, and hopefully it's the start of some good things for me. ;) I was recently asked why I keep a journal or blog ... and to be quite honest I don't know. Maybe I just need a way to expose a part of myself to people ... or maybe I just need to write. I think it's so I can have a history about myself that I can always get to .... that's probably it. When I almost lost everything ... all I could care about was missing my pictures ... the memories. So, why I keep this isn't as important to me as knowing that it's there.

twiddles thumbs ...

I got my new hard drives today ... so i'm transfering all my files to the new drive ... and it's taking forever! My 3rd monitor is messed up, but I need to wait until these files finish transfering to do anything ... ugh. Anyway, I saw "Waiting" today; it was the funniest non-sencical movie ever! Seriously, it had no plot, much like clerks, but just rediculous lines and things. It had a decent message, but who cares! I suggest seeing it if you can't wait till HBO/DVD. 146 minutes left .... My parents came by AGAIN today ... this is pretty crazy now. I don't feel the need to go home now, and it's weird. Ugh, this post is very random .... but my head hurts and i'm kinda tired ... so i don't feel too bad about it ... so f-off :)

Complete 360

OK, so I was about to go to Fedex to send my hard drive, but I just couldn't believe that this was my only option. To cut to the chase, I got all my data back!!! All thanks to Active@! Active@ is a Software Company specializing in data recovery. They make 2 tools that I used, Partition Recovery and UNDELETE, to save my files. I really only needed UNDELETE but Partition Recovery let me see my files and give me hope that a bomb hitting my room is much worse. Here's links to the software: http://www.active-undelete.com/ http://www.partition-recovery.com/ I also bought a Maxtor OneTouch II 300GB portable hard drive. This thing is pretty sweet. It not only a lot of storage, but it comes with Retrospect which will let you schedule backups. It also has this button on the front of the drive that when pressed will backup and newly created/changed files. Sweet stuff. Anyway, now I can get on with my life ... jeesh. That was a scare, so back up regularly ... but this was definitely a huge learning experience for me as well. Dad and Nicole are coming to visit today, which will be nice ... good change from slaving infront of a couple of computers ... In the mean time, I should catch up on a weeks worth of work ... weeeeee

Rock Bottom

To make this not a novel ... Friday night my computer started to act weird. I backed up all my data to another location of the drive where it would be safe, but I didn't think to get it off my computer and onto something else like another hard drive or DVDs. That was my mistake. Something went wrong and I lost access to all my files. There are still on my hard drive but I can't get to them. I'm sending the hard drive to a data recovery company to see if they can fix it, but it's going to cost me an arm and a leg if they can recover the data. I hope the last 7 years of my work and history are not gone .... ... moral of the story ... back up your data. Even if it's every 6 months, do it. Burn your stuff to DVD. It would have only taken 8 DVDs to back up my data before I messed it up. 8 DVDs + time costs a lot less than $1000. If you want to make your life easier, buy an external backup HD. Just do it, cause if you don't it will happen to you. I use to but stopped, and now look what happened.