Adam Schabtach's Blog
General blog stuff.
There’s an article on CNN here documenting one of the worst computer mistakes I’ve heard of. It’s one of those tales that kind of makes you wince when you read it, and feel gratitude that you’re not responsible for this kind of data.
I do wonder, however, why nobody sent one of the drives to a data-rescue service. They can usually recover data from a reformatted drive with little trouble.
I’m fiddling with this site again. Apologies if you happen to be visiting while I’m messing with it.
The temperature broke 70F today, which, frankly, is a bit warm for March. However, in a happy event that may or may not be related, Tracie spotted a butterfly circling in our front yard. I managed to get a fairly good photo of it, despite not being able to get closer than about 10 feet to it. (The digital zoom on the Canon SD700 IS works remarkably well.)
My mom gave us a rain chain for Christmas. I hung it from one of the downspouts on the house recently. A few days later the temperature dropped again, and over the next few days it becamse quite thick with ice. There are photos of it in the photo gallery here.
How this came about is sort of a long story, but the short version is that I built a teeny greenhouse for a basil plant out of K’nex and plastic wrap. As you can see in the following photo, it has made this basil plant quite happy. The structure is about 30 inches tall at its peak, and Tracie has harvested leaves from the plant three times. Much of its remarkable growth took place during the rather cold weather we’ve had recently, and the thermostat in the house is set at 62, so apparently the structure is doing a pretty good job of trapping heat around the plant.
I’m doing some maintenance on this site. If things suddenly go awry, try back later.
Chris has been muttering about Last.fm and today I finally paid attention to him and checked it out. It’s a neat thing, I’ve decided. The idea is that it watches what music you play on your MP3 player (software player, that is) and keeps a little database of your listening habits. Then it looks at the databases of other people who listen to the same stuff that you listen to, and suggests other things you might want to listen to. The very first track I played under its observation (“Escent” by Maitreya) produced suggestions for five other artists, four of whom I’ve never heard of.
Click here. Just do it.
I have this pet peeve: it really bends me out of shape when musicians known for their instrumental releases start putting out material with vocals. I’m listening to the latest Michael Brook CD, RockPaperScissors. It’s a nice disc–or at least the first three tracks are, which is as far as I’ve gotten–with all of the musical sensitivity and production quality that I expect from Mr. Brook. However, I’ve now twice been jarred by someone’s voice. It’s not that I have anything against vocalists per se, but I tend to prefer instrumental recordings and I’m really bummed that someone chose to put some guy reciting some obscure text over the top of what otherwise is a nice track. It’s like finding a dead fly in your mug at a microbrewery as far as I’m concerned–not at all what one had in mind when one sat down.
I purchased a new laptop computer recently–a snazzy new Lenovo X60 convertible Tablet PC. Eventually I’ll say more here about the computer itself, which is my first tablet and quite a fun device. First, though, I’d like to mention the nice case I found for it.
The computer is a somewhat unusual shape for a laptop; it’s smaller than average and is nearly square. This means that finding a case for it is something of a challenge. Lenovo sent me a case as part of a promotional offer (“Free Shipping! Free Messenger Bag Carrying Case!”) which is a nice enough bag for what it is, but it’s completely the wrong size for the computer–it’s far too big. No, I don’t know what they were thinking.