What A Bad Week

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.

Fixing HoudahGeo's City And State Reverse Geocoding

I've been looking into geotagging my photos and finally got around to purchasing a GPS logger. Initially, I just wanted a script to automate the merging of the latitude and longitude from the GPS log into each image's EXIF information, after which, I'd just import the images into Aperture as normal. But then I found out that even more useful would be to reverse geocode the images. This would mean the the IPTC fields for city, state and country would be automatically populated, saving me from the task of manually entering each in Aperture.

Well, HoudahGeo does it better and more elegantly than any other software out there. After downloading a demo and reading Brett Gross' write-up on Aperture and houdahGeo I was sold.

The one glitch is that HoudahGeo saves both the city and the state into the IPTC city field, separated by a comma and a space, e.g., Great River, New York. I sent an email to the developers and was told that the next version, 1.5, would have this fix. Until then, I've whipped up an Automator workflow with a bit of bash scripting that calls exiftool that splits the IPTC metadata properly and will work with cities and states with any characters, including spaces, but not commas. Here's the guts to the Split IPTC City And State Automator Script:

# This automator workflow is licensed under the GPL, v2
for f in "$@"
do
        CITYSTATE=`exiftool -City -s -s -s $f`
        CITY=${CITYSTATE%,*}
        STATE=${CITYSTATE#*, }
        exiftool -overwrite_original -City="$CITY" -Province-State="$STATE" $f
done

So my workflow is now:

1. Copy photos from memory card to temporary directory on my harddrive along with GPS log
2. Use HoudahGeo to tag each image with longitude, latitude and altitude, along with the city/state and country
3. Save the GPS log away in case I need it later
4. Run the Automator script on the images to fix the city/state issue (installing it as a Finder plugin is recommended)
5. Import the images into Aperture

Tracked Down My Mattress Maker

When i was 18, I bought myself a queen size futon with mattress to serve as my bed (since I was too tall for my bed for quite a while). Anyhow, its been years since I got it and the store I bought it all from (super cheap, something like $350 for it all) went out of business shortly after I got it. While cleaning up some papers I've had laying around (I love scanning and shredding, everything is so organized this way) I stumbled across the "do not remove under penalty of law" tag.

My awesome mattress is 89% polyurethane foam pad and 11% thermal bonded polyester fiber batting, measures 58.5" by 79" by 8", weighs 48 pounds and was made in Buffalo, New York by Otis Bedding Manufacturing Co., Inc. as part of their Moonshadow line. Awesome, now I can upgrade to a larger size one day and not have to worry about finding a replacement mattress that is just as awesome.

DOA Mini-Note And Poor Customer Service

I've been going back and forth between HP's Mini-Note and Asus's Eee but decided to get the Mini-Note because it had a higher resolution screen. Now, I wish I waited to get the Eee.

I got the Mini-Note last night and it wouldn't boot. The error I got from grub was "Error 17", so it looks like the harddrive is having issues, possibly damaged or corrupt. I've been on hold for 20 minutes already and haven't been able to get through to a customer service rep. If it weren't for the fact that I'd pay a 15% restocking fee, I'd return it.

Peace Corps + Open-Mesh

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.

Mispronouncing Words

I'm glad to know that I am in good company (Jason Kottke and Randall Munroe) in my hobby of mispronouncing words. Ever since I met Allie, I've been pronouncing antithesis as "anti-thesis". It took her months before she finally said something and it still drives her nuts.

Why Allie Is The Best Ever

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.)

DrupalCampNYC4

This weekend I went to the fourth annual DrupalCampNYC. The last one I went to was two years ago.

I couldn't make it on Saturday but was able to get there on Sunday. I meant to take photos, but didn't, but there's already a set on Flickr in case you missed any of the neat sessions. The only one I missed that I really wanted to see was the DruTube session because I got there an hour late.

Motivation

So I've got three days this weekend (thanks to getting a whole lot of stuff done during the week at work, I've got Monday off) which is great since I've got a big physics test on Monday. Hooray.

What I'm lacking, though, is motivation. I don't want this to happen to me:

¶ I was just out of high school, fresh off the chopping block and had to find my means of living. I was in the arcade playing some video games to separate this new adult feeling, when I saw a huddle of blue shirt and khaki pants gang. I soon realized they weren’t just really close friends but Best Buy employees. I was oddly interested. That night I decided I wanted to be part of that gang that walks through the food court in the mall like they own it...

I slowly eased into the culture, accepted the values and it became my life. I went from department to department, moved my way up the corporate ladder always wishing I had just moved to California to fulfill my dream. Year after year my dream got smaller and smaller, until finally it was gone. There wasn’t even a remnant left behind, just an emptiness.

While I don't want to work for Best Buy, I don't want to lose my motivation to do what I want to do and become this drone with just a job.

No Heat

For the second day now, I've got no heat in my apartment. My landlord thinks he'll have it fixed up by tomorrow, but if not, I'm going to vacate temporarily. I'm on the fence regarding asking for a discount for the month. Even if I slept elsewhere for one night, that's one day out of the month, which means I'd be asking for $39. I don't know if bringing up a $40 issue is worth it in the long run. If the heat isn't fixed for a longer period, I'd be more inclined to make an issue of it.

My landlord did give me an electric space heater to use, but since there's only one circuit for this tiny apartment, the circuit breaker keeps tripping. Oddly, I mentioned to him last month that a second circuit would be awesome, especially if Allie were to move in with me some time later down the line.

We'll see what tomorrow brings. I need to run some errands around home during my lunch tomorrow so I'll ask how things are going then. If it doesn't sound promising, I'm going to tell him I'm going to get some things and leave and he can call me back when there's heat.

Epic fail.