Recuva

It's pronounced "Recover" and it is, amazingly, a file recovery program. On my maimed hard drive, my Desktop and Documents folders said "empty" and refused to open. I installed Recuva and, after some fiddling, retrieved all my emails and desktop documents.

The instructions say you can type a path (e.g. C:/Vacations/Portugal) into the appropriate box, but what they mean is that you can open your favorite text editor, type it there, and then paste it into Recuva; otherwise for each character you type, it starts another search. And if you want to preserve the existing folder structure (you want Portugal within Vacations), you have to find the setting and specify it--that isn't the default.

But everything I'd lost, I got back. Happy, happy!

News Roundup

Better living through chemistry: Since the chiropractor's wasn't helping all that much, I got a prescription for a muscle relaxant and an anti-inflamatory. It's still not entirely healed but it is vastly better than it was for most of July.

College: Josh will be leaving Saturday on his way back to George Mason. I'd expected him to be living in a cardboard box on a sidewalk somewhere, but at the last minute, the Housing Office (despite their explicit policy of "We don't have room for all the freshmen, so try to get the seniors to leave the dorms") found a place for him. Josh's room is above my office--specifically, Josh's stereo is directly overhead from where I'm typing at this moment. The thumpa thumpa thumpa currently vibrating flakes of paint from the ceiling sounds like Bohemian Rhapsody, but I think what he's whistling is Boston's More Than A Feeling.

Zambia: Diana's leaving Labor Day weekend for Zambia, with several cases of supplies (ranging from shoes for the local kids, to spicy mustard for the Americans, to gauze and syringes for the hospital).

Yes, "college" plus "Zambia" means it will be me and the mutt here by ourselves for most of September.

Schlock Mercenary

I've started rereading Schlock Mercenary from the beginning.

Ch'vorthq: Captain, you realize that violence is the last resort of the stupid?
Tagon: Oh, absolutely. Mercenaries are bright enough to resort to violence long before last resorts are required.

Lunch at Bellemonte

Diana and I celebrated her birthday yesterday with lunch at Bellemonte. I had the walnut-crusted chicken on a bed of fettuccine with spinach Gorgonzola cream sauce. I very generously gave Diana a sample, whereupon she spent the rest of meal poaching from my plate.

She said her citrus salmon was also quite good.

My son the hydronaut

Josh and his friend Tom Paul decided they wanted a little more underwater breathing ability than normal snorkels would provide. They got a garden hose, cut it into two lengths, and put both ends through the bottom of a cubical styrofoam container. They put some ballast into the foam box to make sure it would right itself, then put a Confederate flag on top and christened it the CSS Research Vessel Nathan Bedford Forrest. The experiment didn't quite work, because it was hard to get enough air through 25ft of tube once you were a few feet underwater, but research will continue.

Memory

A little over 20 years ago, a friend of mine bought a Seagate 20MB hard drive for $800. Today I bought an 8G flash drive for about $20. That's 400 times the space for 1/40 of the price--his cost in dollars per MB was 16,000 times what mine was, plus mine is portable, takes no power and fits on my keychain.

Of course, we kidded Shelby about "that's more memory than you'll use in your lifetime"; back then, we could fit every program and document we had on a few floppies. On the machine I'm using now, with a hard drive that's two weeks old, I've used about 30GB before loading any games or movies.

How's that stimulus working?

According to CNN: "It is now a rare Friday night that the agency does not seize the assets of a newly failed bank. And the number of banks judged as troubled has soared to 305 as of March 31, up from only 90 a year earlier. Those 305 problem banks on the FDIC's confidential list have combined assets of $220 billion."