“TS” took the HD to a local disk repair shop, who (after some confusion) opened up the case to discover that when the drive landed, it grounded out in 3 places. This means that there were rings of death burn marks in three areas on the drive board itself. This also means that whenever my computer attempted to read anything past the burn marks, it got stopped and couldn’t go any further.

In our attempt to recover my data, we managed to melt the connectors inside the drive. It would have taken three connectors to get past the burn marks, not to mention the hours of recovery, so, it has received the “Lost Cause” stamp.

Moral of the story: Organization can come second to reliability. Back up the new stuff before you start downloading the old to organize archives.

Here’s the scope: I bought my MyBook back in July off eBay. The “one year” warranty expired in October. But I haven’t gotten there yet…

January 17th, while moving my computer to RugDoctor underneath it, my poor little MyBook takes a tiny little spill from the top of my computer to the carpeted floor. Two foot drop at most, honest.

January 18th at 02:00 (wee hours in the morning on my BIRTHDAY), I decide I should do a quick birthday comic to let everyone know I am well and give them something to read. Lo and behold, my little MyBook tries to tell me that my MyArt folder doesn’t exist. (“WTFBBQsauce? I just double clicked on it, of COURSE it exists!“)

I then proceed as any person who has spent endless hours on the telephone with Tech Support; I unplug the drive, restart my computer, and plug it back in. Windows recognized that there is a USB drive plugged in, but no way to access it. (“oRLY?“)

Restart again, leaving the drive plugged in. My computer nearly dies. In a panic (again, wee hours of my BIRTHDAY), I call a more technical savvy friend of mine that I knew would be awake at the time, we determine that it is in fact the drive that is the problem and my computer is not dead.

Relief washes over me, and then I realize… That I hadn’t done my annual disc back-up, and I have photos of my artwork on there that was recently destroyed in the flooding of my mother’s basement. Panic sets back in, TS (for Tech-Savvy) assures me that he will look at it in the morning.

Hours later, amid chores and preparing for birthday celebration, I hand over my drive, and we discover the warranty is up… And attempt to access the data. After a few days of scanning, TS found font files (in the wrong folder) before the hard drive nearly melted itself.

Conclusion: Externals are not a fail-safe. Western Digital makes crap fragile drives that could easily destroy everything you hold dear. Oh, and their warranty policy for a year is just lame.

On January 11, 2006, NASA released their new high-res images of the Orion Nebula to the public. The above image (available in a zoom-able format here) is the sharpest image of the nebula taken by the Hubble Telescope. Cool, yeah?

Well, now look at the image as a whole. Follow from the belt to the right and up a bit and… Hey, isn’t that a face? Holy crap, the gases of previously exploded stars have created what looks like a man looking at the Hubble Telescope as it snaps the image.

Ok, it’s not really new news to me. I just remembered to mention it since I was talking about Orion in the last blog post. Have I mentioned that I like astronomy?

Edit: You know what’s funnier? Navigator replaces the Opera, as well.

Also, AOL/Netscape has this to say:
“While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Recently, support for the Netscape browser has been limited to a handful of engineers tasked with creating a skinned version of Firefox with a few extensions.

AOL’s focus on transitioning to an ad-supported web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be. Given AOL’s current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically-acclaimed products, we feel it’s the right time to end development of Netscape branded browsers, hand the reins fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox.”