Instructions not Instructive

Life is Random

Yesterday, I was heading home from work, barely a couple of miles from the office when I saw a white blazer waiting to merge in with heavy traffic from the opposite side of the road and doing my bit of good kharma, let the driver in.

Now the funny part is that after the blazer merges in front of me, I spot the Autobot symbol on he rear window. Neat, I think, a Transformer fan. And then I think how odd that is since my cousin, Brian, drives a white blazer with an Autobot symbol, but he doesn’t live near me. He lives in… and I spot the Gwinnett county tag (Brian still had an Alabama tag the last I noticed). stranger… tag month is January… that’s Brian’s birth month… I can’t see the driver, but I decide what the heck, it’s been awhile since we talked. I pull out the cell phone and ring Brian. He answers and I say, “I know this is a weird question, but did a red blazer just let you in?” At his point even though I can’t see the driver, I did see him reach down and pick up a phone when I called, so I’m fairly sure it is him. He responds, “As a matter of fact, I was about to ask you if you just let a white blazer in!” Turns out that his new job is hop and skip from mine. Small world I guess.

Living La vida Lazy

Today has been a day spent being mostly lazy. I slept late but I was also up late, so I didn’t really catch up on any sleep. I’ve had laundry running most of the day. And I’ve been busily working on going through my PC files.

You see, last week, my new laptop arrived! YAYYY!!! It’s the first laptop I’ve ever owned. I’ve always been more of a desktop person, but I finally decided that I don’t like being chained to one spot so much. For now, I’ll keep the deskop. But I’m not sure what I’ll use it for.

I had a second 200gb hard drive in the old PC. I’d figured on using the network to access it from my laptop. That worked somewhat, but if the PC went into standby, then I was shut out. Plus it seemed insane to keep the whole PC running just to access a hard drive. So, yesterday, I bought a network attached enclosure so that I could put my hard drive on the network and access it from whichever PC I’m using. The best laid plans…

You see I have a bone to pick with Netgear. Granted, this purchase didn’t have NEARLY the level of research behind it that the laptop did. However, this appeared to be exactly what I was looking for. A way to offload files from my laptop and PC and a place to back-up some stuff. Even better, I could use the hard drive I already had and there’s still a spare bay for future expansion. Okay, so the problem? There’s not much to the instructions in the way of warning you that the file system the device uses is different than windows. Not a big deal had I known that. But my first warning of this?

Was when I went through the wizard and it informed me drive formatted…. Huh, what???

And I had a couple of months of photo files that I had not yet off-loaded onto DVDs or CDs… Plus plenty of other files that I had updated since the last back-up. So, partly this was also a wake-up call to be more consistent on back-ups. But it was also a story of stupidity on the part of a company. I found one SMALL note on page 3 of the instructions, which I was reading but this note was AFTER the point of running the wizard that indicated the device uses a different file system than windows so drives couldn’t be swapped between the two…

GRRRRRR!!! How hard would it be to put that warning in large letters on page 1? Or to have the install wizard warn that there are files on the drive and “are you sure you want to format” rather than just giving the message after the fact…. Luckily last night, I found software to use to access my data. It had been formatted but nothing had been written over it yet… oh thanks… Thus I went to bed about 4am. I just couldn’t sleep until I had succeeded in retrieving everything and burning onto DVD.

The end of it is that everything worked out alright. I lost nothing (but sleep and sanity) and the network drive is working well. I can access it from the laptop over my wireless connection or from the PC which is wired directly in to the router.

Bored yet?

I was in fact awake last night when the storm came barrelling through. The wind here howled around my house. A few torrents of rain seemed to drive into the side. And then it was over. Well, I definitely pick that over destruction, loss of life and property any day, it just seemed odd.

Slept for hours and was up all of half an hour when I got a call from a friend, April, who was nearby with a blown out tire and her parents on the side of GA 400. I drove out to see if I could help, but I got there and they had TWO HERO trucks helping them out. I waited it out with them since I was there anyway. They left behind me and were heading to the garage where they had gotten tires two hours before. Needless to say, the timing of that is suspicous. I think, having been on the side of the road in today’s damp weather, April’s mother was intent on bodily harm.

While files have been whizzing about to hard drives, etc. this afternoon/evening, I’ve spent time catching up on some reading while absently listening to the TV. The dream of doing real house-cleaning today has not materialized. But I suppose there’s still tomorrow. The only real plan for tomorrow is to try to get out for part of the Dogwood fest. I went last year and they had some great art. Considering today’s weather and that tomorrow is the last day, I predict if the weather is decent, it will be crowded.