Allie and I found (on craigslist) Room & Board's Portica Canopy bed being sold for $500 (regularly $1300). I asked my Dad if we could use his truck, instead he offered to drive (probably because he doesn't trust me to drive it) so the other night, we picked it up in Greenpoint and tied it to the roof of his truck. (Thanks, Dad!)
While I would prefer the Architecture bed, for $800 off for a very similar bed that Allie has been drooling over for the past few years, I can't complain. Well, I can. The bedroom is small and the large, canopy thing makes it that much smaller. However, the bed it replaced was a cheap, hundred dollar futon frame, so it's a step up.
Now I just need to find some better lighting in there since the canopy portion doesn't work with the cheap, ten dollar lighting that was in there previously.
So Tuesday night, Allie and I got back from vacation with my family. We spent six days in Colorado and had a really nice time. I didn't know what to expect since I hadn't been on vacation with my parents in about a decade. To thank my parents for taking us on vacation, Allie and I bought them a Canon A720 IS since my mom's old digicam was starting to show its age. More about that later since we're still recovering from everything that happened since we got back.
First, my landlord fixed the heat for good. The last repair to the system was a quick fix to get through the rest of the winter. But he also decided since his heating bills have gone up so much that during the six cooler months when the heat is on, he wants an extra $150 per months to make up for it. My first response was to move, but after looking through craigslist, it turns out that even with this 6 month increase, a better deal cannot be found. It's not the best news, but it's OK. After talking with my landlord, it turns out that depending on cost, he's will to install new windows, run a second circuit and look into more insulation, which should help.
Second, before I left for vacation, I sold my Mac Pro for $2200 with the intention of ordering a $1300 24" refurb iMac upon return. I ran one last Time Machine backup before formatting the Mac Pro and shipping it off to my ebay buyer. When the iMac arrived on Saturday, I plugged the Time Machine drive in and told it to restore. It only ran for a few seconds before it stalled. I restarted the iMac and tried again, this time with the harddrive hooked up directly to the iMac, not through the USB hub built into the keyboard. I got the same result. So I disconnected the harddrive and hooked it up to my G4 PowerBook, hoping to just see the files and copy over my photos and Allison's photos. Didn't even recognize the partition this time.
The rest of this weekend was spent trying various non-destructive data recovery tools hoping that something would work. It's Monday and I've resorted to sending the drive to OnTrack at the referral of MetaFilter. I've been quoted $1000 to $2700 depending on how much data (the drive is 500GB but only contains 171GB worth of data that I want) and how bad the drive is (hopefully not bad since it was working a week ago).
Is it worth $1000? Yes. I was going to sell my 24" monitor and just use the iMac's 24" screen. While glossy and thus full of reflections during the day, is much nicer to look at than my old monitor. A used Samsung 244T sold for $300 or so, so I would actually come out $1200 ahead by downgrading to the iMac, which isn't much of a step down due to the fact that the video card in it is comparable to the one in the Mac Pro in terms of Aperture performance. Aperture also never really stressed the 8 cores (except when doing a large export) so I'm OK with the step down, especially since it was going to save me $1200.
Is it worth $2700? Eh. I can't afford $2700. Allison said she would pitch in whatever she could afford, but I feel bad having her pay for what I consider my fault. Even if I paid for $1800 and she paid $800, I'd still feel horrible. Right now, she's lost a year's worth of photography since she get her DSLR a year ago. It's our vacation to Philadelphia, a few museum trips, family get gatherings and her freelance work for the Long Island Herald. I've lost a little over three years worth, including my trip to Hawaii, our vacation to Philadelphia, a few museum trips and family gatherings. We're really sad about this.
It looks like I will spend at least $1000 on data recovery making this entire thing a wash. It may even have been cheaper to stick with the Mac Pro. Either way the Time Machine harddrive would have died, but it would have died while I still had the original data. There was no click of death nor were there any S.M.A.R.T. failures, so this caught me completely by surprise.
In the future, I'm going to have to keep two backups of everything and rotate one off-site since I can't deal with this again. The cost of a second harddrive to store all our photos on is a small fraction of the cost to possibly recover them.
Allie and I talk about joining the Peace Corps (one of these days) and I keep saying that while there, I'd like to wire up the place. I thought about proposing to the OLPC project, but this Open-Mesh initiative looks really interesting, too. The fact that the hardware is cheap is mainly what I'm looking at (cheaper than a bunch of soekris boards), but the fact that they're open source friendly is even better.
Besides, I think I'd get rather cranky after a few months (days, really) of no internet.
I've been talking about the Secret Science Club for a while and was actually going to go to tonight's meeting, but decided not to since I'm getting out of work late and need to do a few things. Another factor is money is a bit tight until I get paid for some items I'm ebay'ing. Anyhow, Allie left me a little note on my desk that I just saw that said have fun tonight with a twenty dollar bill attached.
Even when we don't have lots of money between the two of us, she still gives me money for beer (they have Guinness on tap at Union Hall), that's why she's the best ever.
(I'm still not going to go, so I'll give her the money back, but I'll make her marinated fish for dinner tonight.)
Last night, over dinner, Allie and I figured out that if Tim Gunn met Chuck Norris, he would probably say "those jeans and cowboy boots are so cliche". Of course, Chuck Norris would roundhouse kick Tim Gunn in the face.
But Tim Gunn would catch his foot and flip him onto his back and say "carry on" and walk away.
