Just about to lay down for some sleep before heading to work in the morning. I thought I would take a minute to check everyone up on what I’m working on. Not to busy at work this week. Although, Friday morning Pat, Mike, and Myself loaded out the moving lights for service. They need new bulbs, focusing, etc… Sounds easy… Its not. We have to lower the truss that is 40 feet up just so we can reach them. Which means we have to climb 50 feet into the ceiling to lower the power cables with the truss as well. Once we get them down. It took two people to hold the lights while one detached them from the trussing. I’m glad their were only 10 of them. It awhile, but its done. Just don’t remind me that we have to put them back up again! But I am looking forward to programming when they come back. It will be nice to program 12 lights that actually match again. We load them in the truck tomorrow, and Pat will drive them down. Thankfully, we managed to get the truck with the lift and not a ramp. YEAH!
Category Archives: Blog
Giant Robot Beetle!
I’m so going to build one of these!!!Â
Hard Disk Recovery
I was almost passed out when I sat down at our computer and saw only one word document on our storage drive. I put the 500GB drive in earlier this year to store our family pictures and videos as a backup, and to allow me to format our system drive. Well, that worked out fine, until Friday when I couldn’t find any of the last 8 years worth of files, pictures, and videos. Needless to say, I was alittle distressed.
I finally was able to get everything back. Luckly it wasn’t a horrible drive failure. I thought someone else might be interested in some of the tricks you can use to try to recover lost data yourself. In windows there is a utility built in called Check Disk. You can use it to identify bad sectors on your hard drive and often times to repair those bad sectors. Microsoft has an article on how to use Check Disk here. There are also a few free or fairly inexpensive (inexpensive compared to the thousands of dollars it can cost to send your drive to a recovery specialist) utilities available from a company called Runtime Software. They have a recovery utility for $79, and you can try it for free to see if it will work before you buy it. Very handy.
Runtime also has a free utility for cloning your hard drive, called Shadow Copy. It is what I am now using to backup my computer. I have a hard drive in a lockable “hotswap” tray that serves as my backup. In the event of a fire or such event, I can quickly grab that drive which will be an exact copy of my computer (windows, programs, files, and all). Or in the event of my hard drive crashing, I can boot my backup and be up and running in under 5 minutes exactly where I left off. Pretty nice setup. There are other product available to do this, but I’m cheap. This works for me.Â
I’m just happy I got my files back! Yeah for Check Disk!!!
Pictures: Trip to Nash Zoo
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Work & Life…
Crazy week for me at work. The annual Choir and Orchestra Easter presentation, First Easter, is coming up on the 5th of April. I didn’t realize that, so I took off this coming week for Spring Break since Kayce will be out. I don’t know how I missed that, but I’m going to be working some of this week just to get ready for the program. I’ve spent several hours already with my good friend “The Soldering Iron” making a 3 to 5 pin DMX cable. Pat and I came up with, what should be, a really awesome lighting/stage setup. I’ve been working on making it work. I had to do some electrical work to get power to the lights on stage, then create the cable so I can control the lights and a hazer from the booth. We are using Martin Mac 500’s and 600’s, they are moving head intellegant lights, for effect lighting. All our principal lights are traditional theatrical lights. It’s alot of fun, and I get to teach myself alot of neat stuff. I really enjoy my job. So, I’m not too bummed about spring break, I like this particular part of my job.Â
We also had a great night last night… Kayce and I got a chance to have a date night. I really wanted to (Don’t know why…) go see Monsters Vs. Aliens in IMAX 3D. I had never seen a movie in IMAX, before… So we went. It was pretty good. I don’t think I would take Parker to see it yet. Some of the humor was alittle crude for young children, plus it might be alittle scary for young kids. Especially at the beginning when Susan transforms into the giant and is promptly and forcably imprisoned by a top secret government agency. But on the whole, the movie was good, and the 3D was better than most I’ve seen. We got there alittle late (hung up at the Popcorn counter…), so our seats weren’t the best. Our seats were great at T.G.I. Fridays, right next to our food. Very convient.
Another Good Dilbert…
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I’m in Love!!
I had the great pleasure yestarday of assembling the most beautiful LCD stand I’ve seen. It was fantastic! Not that I would want this on my house, but how awesome does this look! I ordered and put this together for a Sunday class at FBC to use with powerpoint. This is a great setup for groups of about 30-40. Better than a projector and screen, since setup is so easy, it’s brighter and clearer, and has built in speakers. The cart rocks because… Well, it doesn’t rock… It is stable as can be. Anyway, geek moment.
I would love to podcast…
I was listening to NPR a week or so ago and they have this featured series called This I Believe. I really enjoy listening to these. Some are really well written and most a very good oratories. It makes me want to podcast. Not that I have anything terribly important to say, but there is only so much emotion that can be conveyed through a key board. I really don’t like my voice. I get called Ma’am alot when I’m on the phone. Not really sure why. I don’t have a terribly high voice, maybe it’s just the low quality of the telephone system that makes me sound girly. Not sure. Oh well, in my mind I’m Edward R. Murrow. “Good Night, and Good Luck…”
Interesting Evening…
On Sunday nights Kayce and I are leading a community group. We’ve had a hard time getting everyone together all at once. Just about everyone in the group has come, just not all at once. I’m really looking forward to having everyone together at the same time. We have a great a group of folks. There have been several odd circumstances over the past few weeks that seem to be keeping folks away. We had a baby born, several surgeries and illnesses. And since just about all of us have children, it stands to reason that someone will have a sick child at some point or another. So, on we go… Hoping and praying that everyone will be able to make it each week. Last night was tough… Only one couple came. But the more I think about it, the more I am thankful for some one on one time with another young family. Just to be able to sit around the kitchen table and talk was a great. And after that we had some time before we needed to go get the boys from Kayce’s sister, so we had a good time together. We went to Starbucks, then to Lowe’s. Sometimes God has a funny way of working things out. I thoroughly enjoyed my evening with my wife. We will continue to pray that God will allow everyone to come each week, and be faithful in our preparations. That is all we can do.
We ended up buying a hammock last night… I’ll post pictures when I get it hung. Hopefully, I won’t kill myself getting in and out of it. Have a great week!