As you can imagine from part 1, I was pretty upset and when I’m upset, I blog. And that’s when the third hit came in, as I was writing a blog detailing what happened with the hard drive failure, something equally devastating, no perhaps more devastating happened.

I wrote a huge blog, bitching, ranting, raving and then I hit submit. The page just hung. No response and then a time out. Strange. I checked a few of the other sites hosted on my server… and they were ALL timing out. This was weird. I figured something happened on the internet and figured I’d deal with it when I got home. And I did. I called of course, Pinoyboy to vent and he did inform me that there were some internet backbone outtages and maybe we were affected. I went to bed. Still saddened by my data loss, but I had to teach Tuesday morning and I needed to be focused.

All day Tuesday, things did not improve. Still no dice. I started calling our tech support for our hosting. The hosting company had been sold. I called the new company and their support disconnected me. EVERY TIME I CALLED! I began to panic. Ordinarily again, this would not be a problem as I have backups of the sites… BUT refer to part 1, I have no data, no back up! More worrisome to me was the fact that this was not just my website. It was Pinoyboy’s, Ed’s, Roseld’s, Mike P’s, my blog, my podcast, my family’s email, my friend’s business site, my other friends site. This was a big f*cking deal.

Wednesday came and there was still no word from anyone at the hosting company. I started to accept that this week… my entire computing life was gone. Pinoyboy and I started to look at and decide on new hosting companies and tried to figure out how we could hobble the podcast and our blogs back together.

Thursday, we finally got hold of someone who told us that they didn’t know what happened that although they are our reseller, they don’t own our servers, that’s by another company. They’d call and get things straightened out. They lied. Nothing happened. I was beside myself. I felt so guilty about everyone’s sites being down and apparent data loss. Add to that my data loss and trying to set up the MacBook and I was a wreck.

Friday, we finally got an answer to what happened! It seems our hosting company didn’t pay the managed server company for our servers for the past four months. Seems they are in some sort of a dispute and we were stuck in the middle. The managed server company was actually really helpful and worked with us to get the server back up and by Friday evening we were back in business.

Did I mention thru all this work was a bitch? Yeah.. it was hands down, the worst week ever.

At least as far as technology goes. As you may or may not have noticed, my blog was down pretty much all last week. Not just down but gone… and that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Monday morning, I woke early, way too early, 4 am early. I decided to do some work on the ole MacBook before heading into the shower to get ready for work. I woke it up from sleep and checked a few emails… clicked on a few apps, and opened a file. The file opened and then my system seemed a little unhappy. I got a spinning beachball and started to worry. I tried to force quit the app but no dice. The finder was not even responding.

I decided to power off my MacBook and bring it back up. I mean usually that works. Usually. Today I was greeted with a grey screen, and a CLICK-CLICK-Spin. “That’s not so good” I thought. For those of you who ain’t quite a tech support person… that means…dead hard drive.

Now this is usually not a problem, an inconvenience for sure but not a problem as I’m quite obsessive about backing up my system. Once, years ago the hard drive in my PowerMac G5 died, and since that day… I follow the mantra “Back up early and often!” However, this weekend, my sister brought over her iBook, which is at capacity, no joke she has about 1GB of space left. I needed to move some data off her hard drive and on to another. I foolishly grabbed my backup drive… and tried to mount it. No dice. I don’t know why but it would not see it, so I thought maybe it was because the hard drive was formatted for an Intel Mac, so I decided to format it. I know, I know.. but I figured I’d just do what I had to do and back up my MacBook right away. Can you see where this is going? I never got the chance to back up the MacBook before the hard drive died. I had lost everything. I was so mad, and what made me madder was it was my fault.

All day Pinoyboy and i were chatting off and on about data recovery solutions, freezing the hard drive and how to get myself back together. I ordered a new hard drive and wondered if I should pay the 400-1900USD we were seeing to get my data back. I had hoped the freezing was going to work. I took it home and started to work on it. The freezing did not work, but I did find a backup on another hard drive from about a year ago so the world was NOT over, close but not over.

I thought things were turning around. Who knew my week was just getting started…

Pancakes, Eggs, Sausage, English Breakfast Tea with a splash of milk and my MacBook. These are the things that started my day of rebuilding and getting my digital life sorted at last…

As you might have noticed… my site was down this week. It was just the tip of the iceberg of technical disappointments and failures that was my week. I promise a post is coming detailing it.

For now… I must publicly thank Pinoyboy not only for his help but for his patience.

Who has any cube etiquette left? I blogged about this before and today, I’ve reached my boiling point.

My coworker who sits in the cube behind me had not one, not two but THREE conferences calls on his speaker phone. Just dialed right in and listened to the calls as if he was the only person in the office. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to go tell him to stop but I’m not sure I want to be “that person” but it was annoying.

Now I know what you’re thinking… what about your iPod? Well normally it’s on and CRANKED up but today I was working on some documents and music or podcasts would have really distracted me… well I guess the music didn’t as much since I did have to crank up the volume!

Grr. I wanna go home.

This weekend, we headed to Baltimore for my nephew’s Christening. My sister had originally asked for Silky and I to be his godfathers, but that didn’t happen, between her church’s strict rules about what constitutes a practicing Catholic and the fact that we didn’t feel right about it, we just passed. My brother and sister instead are his godparents and that’s just fine with me.

The drive down was not too bad, riding with my parents was not as bad as I though it would be, especially since no one had an argument, my only complaint was being covered in ashes from my father’s smoking next to me in the back seat. We made good time, had a delicious dinner (gnocchi and sausage) and stayed in a nice comfy hotel.

The day of the christening also went well, my mom wasn’t late (trust me a miracle) and we made it to the church on time. Of course we enjoyed the half drunk priest and the fact that my brilliant (yes at age 6months) nephew screamed bloody murder every time the priest said God, but all in all it was nice. The hour long photo shoot at the end also sucked but what can you do right?

Lunch was at a BBQ place right up the street, it was a bit disappointing because I had eaten at this chain before and the food was off the hook, and on Saturday, it wasn’t so great. But I got to spend time with my family and my favorite little man.

Our little man, all dressed up in a tie at six months!

Saturday, April 14 in 1927 the Volvo Factory rolled out it’s first series car, ÖV 4. Eighty years later, I’m a huge fan and i still love my Volvo S60. They’ve come a long long way from the ÖV 4 to the 240D to the 850 to the S60. Between this year and next, Volvo has some amazing things going on. The New C30, the C70, The S80 an V70/XC70 and soon we hope a new S60.

Happy Birthday Volvo.

Last week, Apple announced that Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard would be delayed. It seems that resources had to be diverted from Mac OS X to the iPhone. This sucks for me as I’m not really looking for an iPhone right off. I am not saying I’ll never want one, btu it’s not going to be in June.

I’m kinda pissed because while I was not looking forward to the Phone, I was looking forward to Leopard. I can see Apple’s point in wanting to delay to ensure the quality of the product, but to be honest, I’m hoping that it’s to get some more features in the OS. The delay sucks big time for Apple, I don’t think this decision came lightly for them I mean think about what this means for other products at Apple, any hardware that was waiting on Leopard is now further delayed, iLife and iWork, two products which I’ve stated before I think are going to be Leopard only and now have to be delayed further.

I guess we’ll all have to just wait and see.

I’ve had about a dozen ideas for blog posts, I drafted a few…but never finished them.

I guess I better had.

Oh I’m so upset right now. Apple announced yesterday that Leopard, the next version of the Mac OS X Operating System is going to be delayed until October 2007. They have blamed development of the iPhone on the delay and stated that they would rather delay the release than put out a substandard product. Now I can understand this point but I’m kinda pissed because, right now the iPhone is not really on my radar. I mean I think it’s a cool idea, and definitely an amazing design but… I’m not in the market for a new phone and I’m not really happy about the provider, price and capacities.

Leopard however, I’m really excited about, almost ironically, I had just drafted a post detailing how much I wanted Leopard to come out. I guess I’m most upset because I was really looking forward to a new “toy” if you will in the next 3 months or so, I guess now, I’ll just have to wait until October.