Archives September 2009

Whew, what a day!  Got home around 7 this evening.  Overall the ride was mostly good… Except for Mike’s bike breaking down.

The weather could not have been more perfect.  The ride to Alton was a blast and Fast Eddie’s was awesome.  It was probably the busiest I have ever seen it!  Even though they were busy it only took 30 minutes to get out food, which isn’t bad… and even better considering for $6 and some change I got a dozen shrimp, a cheeseburger, and fries.

The River Road was gorgeous as it always is in the Fall and Perre Marquette was beautiful as well.  Here the ride took a detour though.  At the top of Perre Marquette when we went to turn around Mike’s Ducati suddenly died.  We spent an hour and  a half working on it and couldn’t get the bike to fire back up.  We checked everything we could have and couldn’t find anything obviously wrong with it that wouldn’t require more time and tools then we had available to us at the top of the park.  Unfortunately Mike had to stay behind and wait 2 hours for his brother from Decatur to come pick him up with his trailer.  That really sucks 🙁

After the now 3 of us got back on the road, the rest of the ride went off with out a hitch, but it was a somber ride home as we all worried about our stranded buddy.  Here are some shots I took during our 280 mile trip.

What’s a Gravatar you ask?

Simply: it’s a universial avatar.  A service that gives your email the same avatar any where you post (that supports Gravatars of course).

I’ve known about them for a while but never really bothered messing with it.

I must admit, the Gravatar Website is ridiculously easy to use.  I mean seriously, stupid easy.  It took me less then 3 minutes to set up an account, upload my image, and crop and size it how I wanted on their site.

Since I figured I have an account, I should use them some how, right?

All comments on all posts now support Gravatars, so if you have one, we’ll get to see it now.

If you don’t have one, you seriously have no excuse not to if you comment on here or other sites a lot.  It is too easy to NOT have one.  Bravo to the Gravatar people.  They put together a nice easy-to-use service.

Today at work I needed some data off a DVD-R from about 3 years ago.  I shuffled through my stack of discs and located the one I needed.  Upon first glance I could tell it was aging because while other discs were still nice and silver, this once-silver disc was very very yellowed and gold-looking.  I didn’t think much of it until we tried to read the disc.

Nothing, nadda, zip, zero, zilch.  We tried 3 different machines and none of them would read the aged disc.

I’m a bit disappointed in Philips’ quality here.  This disc was only around 3 years old, and in my opinion was way too new to have gone bad already!  What a let-down from the Philips brand name.  I can’t say I have bought any of their discs since then, and I’m glad.  I’ll be sure to avoid their media products from now on.  I have other memorex discs from approximately the same era, and they were still perfectly fine.

Below is a picture showing the bad Philips DVD on the right next to a nice good silver disc on the left.

Luckily the data on the disc was unimportant and archived else where, but never the less there is an important lesson to be learned here.

Never use recordable disc media for archival purposes.  This disc was not mistreated, and was not left out in the sunlight.  It was stored in a stack of ~15 other discs.  Recordable media is a great way to transport or play your files, but it should never be used for archiving or backups.  Besides, with how filthy dirt cheap hard drives are, there is no good reason not to use hard drives as your backup medium.