Computer back, me happy
February 27, 2007
It’s astonishing how the Internet is just so important and necessary in my life now. It hasn’t even been a week and I sure felt the loss of the constant stream of mostly useless information. I think most importantly is the ability to contact people by the press of a button, rather than the vast amount of ‘knowledge’ available that makes me want to be on the internet so much.
Anyway, less than half a year ago my 120Gb external hard drive stopped working. It wouldn’t start up and Windows couldn’t recognize it as anything. On it was a lot of my archived files. Basically all my pictures, movies, music, games, and applications were stored there. They were basically all gone. (I have some stuff backed up on CD but for the most part, my years of careful collecting and filing were gone). That was really painful.
I had some stuff stored on my laptop so I wasn’t completely lost. I put off getting a DVD writer or another hard drive just because I’m a lazy asshole.
To teach me a lesson, my laptop hard drive decided to stop working last Thursday. The night before I heard it making strange sounds and it wouldn’t boot up correctly a couple of times. I took this to mean something bad so I quickly backed up my most crucial files (mostly porn, some password protected files, some old NES ROMS, you know the drill). Sure enough, the next day the computer didn’t even recognize a hard drive being installed.
At this point, I had lost all my data now.
The lady did some checking on data recovery services. Get this - the quotes:
- The 120Gb external HD: 450,000 yen
- The 30Gb HD: 350,000 yen
Grand total: they estimated an 800,000 yen cost to recover the data. That’s $8000. I can take many great vacations and make new memories.
It was weird though, when I realized I had lost all my data, instead of most of it, I felt a surprising level of relief. It was liberating in a sense to not have to worry about all those 1s and 0s stored on a spinning magnet. Still I was denied my daily dose of news and email so the pain of being have to face Japanese TV and (gulp) talking to the wife made me yearn for the Internet.
After some careful whining and nagging I managed to get the wife to allow me to buy a new computer! So on Saturday we went down to our local Dospara and ordered a nice shiny desktop. It’s due to be here in about a week and it’s filled with all the new goodliness. I am so going to buy some cheap game that my laptop couldn’t handle and play the hell out of it.
The laptop sunset
February 21, 2007
This morning I turned on my laptop and it said hard disk not found. Last night it was making noiser sounds than normal. I think my laptop is in its final hertz of performance. With it will go all my data because my external HD died eons ago. If I drop of the face of MSN Messenger, more so, it’s because of this death. Agh.
Haircuts
February 12, 2007
Strangely enough one of my least favorite things to do in Japan is to get a haircut. It is one of my more uncomfortable events that I have to put up with once every one or two months depending on my level of laziness.
The salon I go to is just around the corner from where I live and they have this hip and trendy feel to it. I am the antithesis of hip and cool. More obvious is my non-native use of the language. I’m still having trouble understanding the kinds of questions people ask in hair salons simply because they’re so low frequency. Also, the guy that usually cuts my hair tends to speak rather quietly - just adding to my list of worries.
When he whispers and asks me how I want my hair I usually just tell him “the same as before” but sometimes he doesn’t understand and then proceeds to show me the hairstyle catalogs and questions me on length of each hair that I’d like. Usually I can tell him what I want but end up feeling so embarrassed in the process. I then start sweating like I’m about to get an enema and the vinyl sheets they use to cover people up isn’t exactly the best conductors of embarrassment heat.
Just as my body runs out of water to sweat out, the ordeal ends and the best part comes next. I pay my expensive dues and give my thanks and at that point is the longest possible amount of time before my next visit to the hair salon.
Agh it’s all gone!
February 08, 2007
All my Japanese entries were lost in translation! Or the encoding messed up. Whichever.
も?一度日本語?書???
Fuitadnet.com is horrible
February 07, 2007
You now begin my account of the horrible time I had with the webhosting company, Fuitadnet.com. Warning: it’s one big giant angry rant. Ready?
I strongly discourage anyone from ever doing business or acquiring any services or products from Fuitadnet.com. They are horrible.
My test results
I slightly beat my goal of 80% by a whopping 5.25%! Not only that, surprisingly my worst section was Listening while my best was Reading/Grammar. I was expecting the exact opposite. With level 3 out of the way I now look at level 2 without the same level of confidence. Ten months to go. Will I be ready?
