We reformatted the wrong harddrive.

I turned off my computer this morning, and plugged back in the other harddrive, having found some promising walk-throughs on getting Linux to read an NTFS-formatted drive. When I turned it back on... I didn't get my boot screen options. I got the Windows loading screen.
And not just the Windows screen - MY Windows screen, the bootskin I'd installed. When my Windows loaded - it had my own desktop image there (which should have been wiped out in the reformatting), it had the same folder on the desktop, the same Windows skin...

Apparently, for some bizarre reason, when Dad and I installed my F drive, we put it in the upper slot, not the lower? Or I don't even know, Tom and I just spent like two hours poking at the drives and the master/slave pins and the bus and lord knows what else. But basically, it appears our move of mega-paranoia in unplugging the drive we didn't want touched, led to that very drive we didn't want touched getting fucking WIPED.

Which, really, is pretty funny, now that I'm a little calmer. Even at the time of discovery, it was still kinda funny, I was almost laughing, while I was crying and clinging to Tom and my mind was racing figuring out what I'd lost.

...I lost all the cds I'd ripped. Which I can get back, I physically own all those cds...it's just 350+ cds worth. Most of which are back in North Chili. aaaaaaaaaaargh. I lost a couple of Photoshop files, but I think only a few, some crappy things that really weren't worth saving, a few sketches I'd worked on a bit, but that really weren't looking too hot (they were what helped me realise that using the Wacom tablet for drawings start-to-finish was hurting my drawing style), one file I'd sort of wanted to keep, just to showcase how well I could touch up a photo, from shitty off-color slightly-grainy scan, with a pimpley face, to something really professional looking, that I did up for a coworker. But, I've done things similar to that plenty, it's not that big a loss. I *did* lose a few major downloads, these lecture series I've been listening to the past month or so, but, those are still pretty heavily seeded via bit torrent, they'll be easy to get back.

After a good deal of poking at things, and, hopefully, *really* reformatting my C drive this time, Tom and I got it partially back. I can load into the fresh install of Windows now, it'll go to the right boot screen, and... well, it'll start to go into Ubuntu/Kubuntu. But it hangs up before it really gets anywhere, even in safe mode. So, when Tom gets home from class, he's goingto reinstall Linux for me. It shouldn't be too huge a deal, inasmuch as the partitioning's already set up and all, but, we hvae to redo EVERYTHING we just got working. Luckily it wasn't too much yet, and having just done it, it'll only take me like 10min to get the mp3s working again and things. The graphics drivers, I'm a little concerned about, inasmuch as I did so much random poking that I'm not sure I remember what all I did to make it work, but I *think* it was just setting it up to recognize my specific monitor, rather than fighting anymore with the graphics card. (nVidia graphics cards are a biiiitch to make work with Linux.)

I'd do more work on it myself today, but, Tom already knows how to do the install quickly and happily, and, I'm filling in for someone at work tonight, so I need to start getting myself showered and ready and things. Also, I was going to start getting my bike back in shape for the season today. (Especially since I have work Sunday morning, and the bus doesn't run weekend mornings, and I'm so tired of asking people for rides, I always feel so bad about it.)

On the bright side of things, it appears to be my sweet peas that have sprouted, and the plant's already about an inch and a half tall; it'll grow quickly, I know, so I'll have something blooming before too long, which's good. Tom is being very supportive of my computer issues, and was very reassuring about me not really having lost much. Also, he's got the latest media arts podcast (available at theartlab.net; I need to start getting copies of it again because they're always highly entertaining) somewhat editted, and played a clip for me this morning: He'd been talking about his capstone, talking about the style of the playing cards he's going to be using and all, and Howard (who's one of the major Media Arts superstars, the one everyone usually goes to for help) asked him to clarify the bit about having someone else work on the actual artwork for him. And Tom said he was having his girlfriend do it, 'because she's really good at Photoshop. Like I'm good at it, but she's *really* good, so I'm just like here, you do it!' And Howard said "Melissa's a wizard at Photoshop", and Eliot (who graduated the year before me, and is the main Media Arts professor now, and was a part of the universally-admired Tomorrow is Forever project) said, "So you might say she's a Photoshop ninja." And everyone agreed.

I AM A PHOTOSHOP NINJA!! This is the greatest thing ever. Any site or forum or anything that asks me for my position or occupation or whatever, that's so going to be it. (Also.. it gives me such a huge burst of self-confidence again, hearing that. Like I want to go make things again right this minute. I mean, the handful of things I've done lately, I really, really like, and it seems to come pretty easily now to get nice-looking stuff, but, it's an entirely different matter to know that someone else is impressed by it. Especially people whose work *I'm* very impressed by.) So, yay.

 
(The only way I'm ever going to get back into the swing of this, is if I jump right in, and don't try to post a backlog of things, because Lord knows I never finish those, just feel burdened by them, and the onus of having to do them keeps me from posting.)

So, I've finally taken the leap and not only let Tom reformat my Lawrence's C drive, but, we've put Linux on it. And Windows, as well - set it up as a dual boot, because I KNOW there's going to be something (coughPhotoshopcough) I want to use that won't work on Linux, and Lawrence isn't strong enough to handle that huge an emulation. (Yet, anyway - Melissa's tax refund is going to be spent on a few long-overdue upgrades to a five-year old system.) For the most part, there's something comparable in Linux for everything I've ever used in Windows.. it's just more complicated to find, and I have to re-learn everything, which's going to be a pain in the ass, but is probably good for me. It also gives a nice sense of accomplishment, when after a few days of silence, you finally get mp3s to work. (Something I actually didn't know about music files - mp3 is a proprietary format! No wonder all the major geeks use .ogg and whatever all else. Anyway, you just have to download a few extra things and poke shit to get it to work on Linux, it's not any sort of prohibitive thing, Linux just doesn't come with the playback built in.)

Granted, I haven't had much spare time to play around with my computer - it was a good couple of days before I set my own image as the desktop picture. I haven't even hooked my F drive back up yet. ---In a move of extreme paranoia, we unplugged it from the bus when we reformatted the C drive and installed Linux and Windows, just so there was noooooo way any of the tons of stuff there would be touched. I did back up my entire mp3 stash to dvd, which I should have done ages ago.. and in so doing, discovered why I always run out of room on that drive so fast. I have 50gb of mp3s. My iTunes was showing just shy of 10k files, though that was with podcasts, and without any of the massive torrent I got from overclocked remix.

But so far, I think I'm doing ok. I was scared absolutely shitless when we reformatted - I literally spent a week backing things up, and trying to think of things I needed to back up. I nearly forgot the little post-it notes on my desktop, and my favorites from Firefox. But, I think I got everything. I made a list of everything even remotely important in my start menu, and went through that to be sure I had something compatible I could get for Linux. (Everything was good, except Finale, but I know there are music composition programs for Linux, I just don't know what they are yet, since that's not exactly something Tom ever looked into.) But yeah, I was cliiiiinging to Tom and pacing and terrified when I told him he could finally go ahead and reformat. The process was actually much quicker than I'd expected, and even with a few extremely minor glitches in setting up the dual boot and Ubuntu/Kubuntu (Ubuntu is the flavor of Linux I have, Kubuntu, as far as I can tell, is a slightly prettier version of its interface), it was pretty much done in a night. Admitedly, Tom has done this exact same thing like five times (on his computer and his father's, having run into a few issues and had to re-do his a few times on his first try), but still. And, it *did* take freaking forever to get my graphics card to work right.. I'm still not quite convinced this thing's really at the resolution it claims to be, but at the moment, I'm no longer paying attention to it. We'll see what happens when I really buckle down and undertake some real graphics work.

Fortunately, any problem I could possibly have, other people have had, and so Google searches have so far helped me pretty well. The mp3 playback, I got going without Tom's help! bwa. (Really, it's a comfort to find that I can still sort this stuff out without his help, I feel like I'm always pestering him about things, and his natural helping demeanor is a bit condescending.) I have tomorrow off, and my plan is to hook my F drive back up, and get Kubuntu to cooperate with it. I don't remember for sure, but I've a strong hunch it's NTFS formatted, and according to Tom, that means Kubuntu will probably read it happily enough, but will be bratty about writing to it. Given that that's where I store my music, and that I've already downloaded like three albums (comes with a bit torrent client all good to go, hee - and I needed sooomething to listen to), that needs to work. Also, while Linux will (supposedly, I haven't tested this yet for myself) read the Windows area of the C drive, Windows is not going to read the Linux part. So if I decide to bounce files between Gimp (free version of basically Photoshop - but it looks weird and I don't know it at all yet) and Photoshop.. I need both OSes(?) to read the F drive happily.

omg I feel like such a geek right now. ^___________^ yay.

But it's really weird, the things I'm finding that I miss. As I was poking at my new bit torrent client, I noticed there wasn't a thing that showed your share ratio. My share ratio! I was really freaking proud of my share ratio on Azureus, like it gives you a little red icon if you're less than 1:1 (uploading as much as you download), and anyway I like giving back to the p2p pool, and on Azureus, I had a share ratio of like 1: 2.74 or something ridiculous. (Doesn't seem like much, but when you've downloaded like.. oh god, it was like 60gbs maybe six months ago! that's a lot of uploading.) I miss seeing that and having that there.

Thank goodness, last.fm is good to go still - the iTunes-ish program that comes with Kubuntu, Amarok, already has last.fm built in! Took me a few tries to get it going, but I got it, and it's working quite happily (now that I've fixed all my track tags..which has me a little worried, I don't usually have to do that, I hope Amarok isn't reading them differently than everything else, there's no freaking way I can re-tag everything I own!). Which was great, but.. I miss seeing the little last.fm icon in my system tray. I miss being able to *heart* tracks. And, really, I'm not sure I'm going to stick with Amarok, I don't know. Tom claims it's unfathomably better than iTunes, but, I'm not seeing it yet. It looks clunkier and more complicated. Granted, iTunes' gray was really getting to me after all this time, but.. meh. We'll see. That one, I have a choice on, at least, there's apparently a build of iTunes for Linux, which makes me very happy.
Though, I have no idea how to get my hands on it. I can't just go online and click to download an .exe and there we go, I have to go through this little package manager that I don't quite understand yet, and punch in what I want, and see if it can find it for me. If it can, great, click, tell it to install, s'all good. If it can't... uhm. I don't know what to do yet, Tom hasn't explained that far. ^^; I hope it's not complicated. Apparently I'm going to be getting a lot more friendly with terminal commands, now that I'm on this OS. Which is good, I'd like to be, I just have no idea really what I'm doing just yet. Though, I *did* get the graphics hardware to work right, when Tom had gotten annoyed and given up. So maybe I'll be ok. :)

And I'm sure I've bored the hell out of anyone who's tried reading this far, my apologies. But this is my blog, and I'd like to get back to using it again, I miss having someplace to just ramble and not worry if I'm boring people.

Otherwise, my life is pretty calm and semi-routine, as it has been for awhile. Work hours are always all over the place, but they do sometimes fall into enough of a pattern that it doesn't really bother me. Until random things come up, like me actually working a Saturday morning in a few weeks, and, uh, someone calling me like two minutes ago to ask if I can work his shift tomorrow night. I was really tempted to turn him down, inasmuch as, I was REALLY freaking looking forward to having tomorrow off, having worked 9-5 the past three days, and the evening before that to boot. But, having been watching my bank account nervously the past week or so, uh.. I could use the extra few hours. ^^; bleh. I'm not entirely sure what brought me a little nearer to financial eggshells this month, but I'm thinking it's partly that last month was a short one, a few random things came up I needed to spend money on, and I think Tom and I have been eating out/ordering pizza more. I'm not used to eating out often at all, but Tom grew up eating out like several times a week I think, so it's a normal meal option for him, whereas for me it's more of a special occasion. So we're still trying to balance that.. not that I don't like going out to eat, I freaking love not having to cook sometimes, but, I worry about the money-part. Food is basically my area of funding, while Tom covers the bills - they generally work out about even. Don't get me wrong, I'm not in any sort of trouble, so no worrying about me. And even if I was, I have a tiny cushion in savings, and Tom has a much larger one, so we're fine. :) It's just a little tighter than usual this month, and I think I know where the leaks are, so it'll be easy enough to haul things back next month.

I'm hoping for fantastic weather on April Fool's, so I can drag Tom to Aldrich's - they have an annual tradition of selling some incredibly bizarre flavor of ice cream on April 1, like they've done Chicken Wing'n'Blue Cheese, Spaghetti, Beet, all sorts of bizarre things, and I've been meaning to get out there every year I've been in this town, and it still hasn't happened yet. Weather's been reasonable lately though, and I get out of work at 4 on Sundays, so it should work out.

Last night was spent with me getting mod podge all over myself, as I decoupaged the living daylights out of a small box I snatched from work, which is very nearly the perfect size to hold seed packets. (I have a small collection started again, I've lost what seeds I bought in the past like six times, and I'd like that to stop happening.) It's actually coming together really, really nicely, I'm very happy. I've hung onto a few random catalogs that have appeared in my mailbox, so pulled a lot of random patterns and images from there, and I bought myself a small package of random papers for scrapbooking (all sorts of gorgeous images of old newspaper ads and photos and antique things and old music, yay), as well as a sheet of paper with vintage floral/horticultural images on it - best 50cents I'd spent in a while, hee. There's this fantastic little store in the plaza that's a two-minute walk from my apartment, The Art Trunk, that I'm in like all the time, they have every sort of happy little arts'n'crafts goodies I'm ever looking for. Yarn and pretty beads and paint things and sewing bits and fabric remnants and ribbon and a ton of gorgeous scrapbooking things (which I'm only just starting to snatch up for my own random things).. it's a dangerous place for me to be in. But, yarn is the priciest of my interests just now, and I've got two projects with that I've been working on for weeks already and still haven't finished. uhm. So I'm safe with yarn expenses for a bit.. and even then, I only occasionally splurge on the pricier ones, if I have a specific little thing in mind. I do still wind up getting cheap yarn for big projects at WalMart, which I hate having to do, but, what can you do? I've looked online, but shipping prices for yarn are freaking ridiculous, so, we'll see.

I think I should stop rambling for a bit, it's--- HOLY HELL HOW IS IT QUARTER TO TEN ALREADY?! I last looked at the clock an *hour* ago?! Crap. lmfao. I need to get some food together, Tom'll be back from VAP really soon, and I think I'm hungry too, we haven't had dinner yet, just a handful of cookies. No wonder I feel so tired, I haven't eaten and it's getting close to my bedtime. (God that's so sad. But, I was up at 7.30 the last three mornings...) Going now, but I'm sure not for long, I've been chatting with people here and there lately, and discovered that I miss doing that. But, rest assured, uh, there's been very little to report from my little world. It's very quiet and content and happy overall, and things are generally good. :)