Life Through the Eyes of an Ambulance Driver

When somene is mad at you, you might want to say ‘Who licked the red off of your candy?’

If you have read the previous post I made about Guantanamo Bay, you’ll know how I feel about it being closed. I’m still against it, even though the Executive orders have been signed. Bill O’Reilly’s talking points tonight tell more about why I think it’s a bad idea. See below:

What is Habeas Corpus?

Late last year, my Western Digital mybook hard drive stopped working. I had bought it less than 2 years ago for the purpose of backing up and archiving my data on there. I don’t know what the deal is with Western Digital. They used to be the best hard drive company for a while, but I won’t ever buy another one from them. I’ve had a couple of their internal hard drives die on me before this one, and this is the last straw. I read up on the Internet about this and found that are issues with this external hard drive. Apparently, the average use people were getting out of these drives was 2 years. The majority of the people were having problems with the hard drive enclosure not getting power. Ironically, these drives were advertised as being big relaible drives that you could store all of your important stuff on for a long time. Guess you can’t trust anything made in China. There was nothing earth shattering that I had on my drive. Come to think of it, I doubt there’s much of anything earth shattering about my life anyway. In fact, I can’t remember much about what was on there. The only thing I could really remember that I wanted back was about 4 years of email that I had archived on there. This is another reason why I stopped using email clients and have gone to email in the cloud with gmail.

So I figured I would try to recover my data. I bought a new enclosure for the drive, as it is just a regular 3.5″ WD drive that can operate in your desktop, but has a fancy box that goes around it. It uses a SATA interface, and my old desktop only does IDE. The new enclosure was about $30 from newegg. I plugged the new drive in, and still it didn’t work. The problem I was having is that it wasn’t being recognized by the computer. When I turned it on, I heard the drive spin up, then click, pause, click,  pause, click, pause, click, then the drive stops spinning. Obviously, something physically wrong with the drive. I don’t know if the heads were sticking or what, but it was looking like a paperweight at this point. I did some more research on the topic and found where some people who have had physical hard drive issues have been able to resolve them by putting the drive in the freezer. I figured, the next step in this drive’s life was the trash anyway, so I gave it a try.

Last night I put it in the freezer. This morning, I got up to try it. I plugged it in, and the same thing. Clicks with nothing. I tried turning it off and on several times, still nothing. I even resorted to the Irish screw driver (hitting it really hard) and still nothing. Well, its officially trash. I found another site that talked about opening the drive. I figured I had never seen the inside, I might as well try. The torq screws were odd, I couldn’t get a driver that I have here at the house to work with it. I have some torq screw drivers, but they weren’t the right size. So, I resorted to another simple machine. The lever Enter my hammer, flat headed screw driver, and a pry bar. I got the top off of it, and manged to put some good scratches on the platters. I also got the magnets out of there. Those were some damn expensive magnets, but that is all that is left of it. So, no more Western Digital drives. Now I’ll have to save up for another drive to use for backing up my data. In the meantime, my web host Dreamhost offers 50 gig of space to backup your data. That should be enough for now for my important stuff.

This is kinda late getting written, but I have a great excuse. On the day I left Denver, half of the keyboard on my laptop began to only work intermittently. I discovered that banging harder on the keys don’t make them respond any better.

So I left Denver on Sunday 12/21. Of course, the day after  the crash at DIA. I was afraid I wasn’t going to make it on time. I planned to go to the Park and Ride that RTD offers, but the lot was full. I was bummed because my roommate had given me free tickets to ride the bus. It was going to be sweet. Free parking, but it didn’t work out. So I proceeded to the economy lot. Upon arrival there, I discovered that it was full, and I had to go to the overflow lot. By this time, I had exceeded the cushion I had built in to my leaving from the house time. I rushed my way to the overflow and took the shuttle to DIA. Let’s see $5 a day for 10 days, great, I’ve gone from free parking for Christmas to $50 parking for Christmas. Now that’s a deal!

I got to the kiosk right about the edge of the check in time for having checked baggage. I had already done the online check in, and I just had to check my baggage. Now, off to fight the security gates and try to make it to the gate in time. Security wasn’t too bad and I made it in time to the gate…. to find out that the flight was delayed. I spent 2 hours in DIA delayed, meanwhile I had a connection flight in Houston, TX to get to my destination in San Antonio, TX. Most of the country was delayed that day because of some bad weather. So the reason they gave me that we were delayed leaving DIA is because of bad weather in Houston. I checked the weather radar (because I discovered that DIA has free Internet, its slow and not very good, but its free). Low and behold, there wasn’t a single cloud over Houston. I don’t know what this mysterious weather was that was over Houston, but apparently we couldn’t leave.

Thank goodness I had exit row seats though. When we finally boarded the plane, they wanted volunteers to give up their exit row seats. Maybe I’m just a cold hearted jerk, but I am not giving up my exit row seats. I have long legs, and what ever reason someone else has can’t be much worse than mine. Some nice person gave up their seats and a lady with her leg and arm in cast came back to take his seat next to me. I asked her “Let me guess, skiing accident?” She said some snow boarder on the slopes had run into her without even stopping to see if she was OK. The guy with her chased him down. Then the flight attendants realized they couldn’t allow this woman in the exit row as it was against regulations to have someone disabled to sit there. Seeing as how they crashed one of their planes yesterday, they needed to make sure they played by the rules.

When I got to Houston, I got off the plane about 10 minutes before my connecting flight left. I ran down to find the gate only to find, that once again, my flight was delayed. I was a bit thankful for this as I doubt I would have made it. So, I went off to get a bite to eat. I got a salad at Wendy’s which according to the person working there was the last one. Lucky me, but no free Internet at Busch International Airport.

I got to Houston a little later than had planned. Wendy, came to pick me up and bring me to her parent’s house. Her mom was up waiting for us. It was around midnight when we got there, so we all went to bed. I had a great time visiting with Wendy’s parents. They fed us well and kept us entertained. We went to a swanky restaurant called Tower of the Americas. The food was good. It was like the space needle in Seattle. It rotated and we were able to see a full view of San Antonio. Pretty cool, and my steak was great. We then went down to the Riverwalk and did a boat tour. The lights were pretty and it was fun. We also went to Nixon, TX where Wendy’s dad is from. I got to meet several of Wendy’s Aunt’s, Uncles, cousins, and her grandmother. Its a tradition for them to have a big family party on Christmas Eve at her grandmother’s house. I had a great time meeting her family.

On Christmas day, we opened presents. Wendy gave me an iPod Touch. I couldn’t believe it. That was something I had been really wanting, and  its expensive. I had no idea she would spend that much on me. I guess she’s serious about this  Well, it was a wonderful gift and I have been enjoying it very much, especially at work. Wendy’s dad smoked a turkey that we ate for lunch. It was a really tasty turkey. Late that afternoon, Wendy and I flew to Jackson, MS where my family is.

My mom, brother, and his wife came to pick us up at the airport. We got in late so we got home and all went to bed. My dad was working, but he was going to have the next few days off. This was the first time Wendy had met my family. On Dec 26th, we did our 2nd Christmas, this time with my family. We sprung my grandmother out of her retirement home so she could be with us. The neighbors fried us a turkey for Christmas dinner #2. It was pretty good too. Mom cooked way too much food as usual. My aunt, uncle, and two cousins came up from Louisiana to vist late that afternoon. I hadn’t seen all of them at one time in a long time. It was great seeing them. The next day Wendy and I went to go visit my friend Ramsey from college. He told me he didn’t believe Wendy existed so I had to prove it to him. We also went by and visited a couple of my other friends from school. I had been wanting to introduce her to my friends. She’s a great catch and I want to show her off. One night we at at Cock of the Walk in Ridgeland. They serve southern fried catfish. A home meal I always look forward to. It was really tasty.

Of course we were rushed to try to see everyone and do everything. There’s never enough time to spend at home as you would like to have, but I was glad to get to spend the time that I did have. And I was really glad that Wendy and I got to spend time with each other’s family.

Next year, who knows what is going to happen.