Well, I know I said in my previous post that I was going to do a post that night. I lied. I’ve been tied up with a bunch of different stuff and haven’t had the chance (or inclination) to do a post. I’m rectifying that now, of course.
All in all, we were without power for a few hours short of two weeks. By the end of that time, we were about at the end of our ropes. Fortunately my friend Josh had a coworker who needed to sell his generator, so my parents got a bit of relief. For me, my relief came when I had to travel to Oklahoma City on business. My trip there was more or less uneventful, though I did get to meet up with Jeff and Malinda. Thursday night we had dinner at Victoria’s, which was a local Italian restaurant on the campus of OU. On Friday night, Malinda cooked dinner at their house, and then the three of us and their friend Karen played a boardgame called Twilight Imperium. Twilight Imperium was fun, and I did a lot better at it than I expected. The game lasted until 2 AM, and the fact that Jeff won at the end was a fluke; we had agreed to end then anyway because we were getting tired. Malinda for one was probably glad we ended at that point, as my space fleet was getting pretty massive and was lining up on her borders for a probable invasion. ;-) The game also got me more interested in the 4X genre of gaming; I may give it a try sometime in the near future.
However, when I got home, I suffered a couple of setbacks. The first setback was relatively minor. Apparently my car’s toll tag will not work for airport parking. When I tried to leave the economy lot, none of the gates would open for my car. What struck me as odd was that the lot let me in without needing to get a ticket, as if the tag reader had read my tag. I ended up paying the tag in cash. However, the really weird thing was that when I called the county toll road authority, they were stumped too. My tag is activated for airport parking, and they confirmed that the standard toll booths are reading my tag. If this keeps up, I may need to get a new tag.
The other setback was more serious. I got home from the airport and switched on my main PC, only to find that the two week long downtime had killed one of my two SATA hard drives. The problem is that I had the drives in RAID 0, which meant the data was striped between the two drives so they appeared as one large drive. In other words, I lost one drive but also lost the data in both. Fortunately, the only data I didn’t have backed up are the movies on my iPod, and I’ve found a way to get the movies off it. Still, it’ll be an annoyance, as once the replacement hard drive arrives, I’ll have to reinstall Windows XP and all of my applications again. Joy. That’ll probably happen this weekend. In the meantime, I’m using my PowerBook as my main workstation at the house.
Ah, well. As far as the rest of this week goes, I’m just going to catch up on work and make sure everything that needs to get done gets done. I’ve also been catching back up on the evening exercise missed thanks to the lack of power for two weeks. Otherwise, it’s back to the same old grind. Fun fun…