Month: September 2005

Well, remember how I nearly lost all of the information on my website the other week.

I also remember having some issues with my hard drive a month or so before that.

My hard drive crashed approximately a week ago, what a downer. I haven’t made any backups of the information on there, which is very sad. Even worse is that although most of my information can be brought back in one way or another, a lot of Ava’s stuff is on there too. It’s really my responsibility to keep it backed up, so oh well.

I have been forced to do upgrades to my computer, even though I would rather wait for a later date.

I got a new motherboard, an ASUS P4S800D-X which gives me a few more options which I didn’t have before. I now have a video card, a Leadtek with nVidia GeForce MX4000, it beats my onboard graphics hands down, which is cool. It was actually the cheapest card I could find at the computer store.

The other addition is two new hard drives. I bought 2 Maxtor 120GB SATA drives. I got two so I could set them up in a RAID 1 configuration (mirroring) just to be on the safe side. I think a DVD burner might be on the list of things to get in the future, just for the ease of backing up lots of information.

On the hard drive front, I am sending it to a hard drive repair place. They have a clean room and engineers who work on hard drives. Price for just looking at the drive NT1100 (about R250) and then a quote for the repair which can run from NT10000 to NT40000 (R2000 to R10000) or so. I will send it in and discuss with Ava when we get the quote to see if we will repair it, or at least salvage the information. OUCH!

The company is Lin Wei Data Recovery.

The computer is noticably faster with the new motherboard as the old motherboard was only a 667MHz board, which made things run down on notch.

I also went for a ride (off-road) last weekend, but was disappointed when I found that my bottom bracket was coming loose. I will have to fix it before I go riding again. I don’t take care of my bike and kind of just expect it to work all the time. Time for a little loving care.

I, on the whole, am getting on well. It has been a little tiring with the computer issues as they lead to late nights figuring out what to do or what has to be done next. The computer is now working and that side of things will be back to normal.

Well, last Thursday Typhoon Talim hit Taiwan pretty hard. There was lots of wind and there was a fair bit of flooding around those places that usually get flooded.

Anyways it came and went. It was the fourth Typhoon this year that resulted in a day off work. There haven’t been this many typhoons in such a short time for ages I’m told.

Life goes on as usual. Where I stay there is never any flooding so things are the same. The water has become unusable, except for washing, even the water department said that they recommend that you take the top off the kettle once the water has boiled and let it boil for another 10 minutes. It now looks a slightly yellow colour when poured into a container.

Ava passed all of her exams, which were a few weeks ago, and is now officially in university. So tomorrow she starts back at university in the evenings.

As for me, I have decided after putting on much extra weight that I need to switch back to my healthy diet again. Not watching what I eat for the last four years since I got here has taken it’s toll. So it’s lots of vegetables, fruit and meat for me.

Work goes on as usual, but it’s pretty relaxed, only 4 teaching hours in an 8 hour working day, so there is lots of time to read and to get ready for classes.

I hope all of you are doing well.