Happier Stuff

It isn’t that nothing good happened last weekend, it’s just that the bad was bad enough to far outweigh everything else.

One good thing was that two of the three hard drives in the house survived the fire (and water and ice) and still functioned properly long enough for me to copy all the data off them onto a good drive.  (The third one has the click of death indicating that the electronics are toast; the data on the platters could be fine, but it would cost a lot of money to find out.)  Both of the "good" drives got at least somewhat wet and smokey, and both water and smoke can damage a drive, so of course they need to be thrown out now, but that doesn’t matter now that the data from them is safe.

In any event, I didn’t expect any of those hard disks to survive, let alone 2 out of 3.  The moral of the story is: if your data is important to you, back it up, and at least keep the backup drive in a firesafe.  If your data is really important to you, then store the backup drive offsite except when you’re actually performing the backup.  (In this case, one of the two surviving disks was the backup disk.)

Saturday was also my dad’s 50th birthday, and all the whole family got together and went out to dinner.  It was festive and fun if a little awkward.  And just when you think it’s humanly impossible for a baby to get any cuter, Cailin gets cuter.  She’s also now able to imitate cat and cow sounds.  (Of course, they’re the same, but give her a break, she’s only 1, you know.)

On the drive back to school, the moon was bright, and it was really something to see the starry sky between the snowy mountain peaks.  It was night, but bright enough because of the snow and the moon that you could see the mountains and the trees clearly.  I wish you could have seen it.