Tuesday 26 January 1999

As the Americans say, sometimes things suck and sometimes they blow. Late last night, one of my Iomega Zip cartridges blew. Now, I knew it was not in the blossom of its youth any longer, because I have Gibson Research's freeware utility Trouble In Paradise. It had for a while now registered around 30 soft errors each round and the occasional firm error, but not hard errors. So I had expected that the cartridge would gradually fill its spare sectors, at which time reformat would await it.
Yes, I have used Iomega products since their dinner plate sized 20MB "Bernoulli box"; and despite their loud braying to the contrary, their products degrade much faster than an ordinary hard disk, I would say 10-100 times faster in terms of write operations. It is more than good enough as a backup medium, but using it as a working disk will lead to data loss sooner or later, depending on the individual cartridge and probably also the drive.
Anyway, this one did not go gently into that long night. One minute it was approaching early middle age, the next it locked up my entire system. Yes, to the point where I had to press the reset button because Ctrl-Alt-Del had no effect. Of course I repeated the experiment, then today again with another drive but the same cartridge. As soon as any program (including TiP) tries to access that cartridge, EVERYTHING freezes up completely.

Now it so happened that this cartridge held the local copy of my Internet files, diaries and their corresponding pictures etc. Luckily, FTP works both ways, so no big bother for little brother. But it also held my restructured Daggerfall section, which I meant to upload today to the new server which has been gracefully provided for me by the great and generous people at dvMUD.net. Now all the changes are gone, so my DF pages will not move out for some more days probably. (Note: Only my Daggerpages will move out, leaving even more space here for the antics of my boundless ego. Take heart!)

This is all minor annoyances. The severe blow was the loss of my entire set of digicam pictures of my young bestfriend when she had brown hair. I had well over a dozen pictures, all of them beautiful in its own and unique way, and they are now locked inside the insane cartridge. What shall I do? I have pondered putting the disk in the freezer in the hope that scientists of the far future will be able to revive it and gape in wonder at the beauty that was the end of the twentieth century.

Certainly I can foretell the reaction if, no, when she learns about the mishap. "What? You lost all the pictures AGAIN? I am SO disappointed! You'll NEVER get to take another picture of me! You just lose them anyway!"
Actually I didn't lose all the pictures. I have one in BMP format as my windows background. (*Knocks wood.*) And the jewelry pics are on another disk. Still, gack.

On the bright side (and this is so bright that I ought to wear shades) yesterday was the release of the first full CD from Infinity, the Norwegian Happy Music Dance band. Despite them being Norwegian, there is nothing ethnic about the music. They sing in a fully natural English, and the style is fully international with the slight elevation towards extreme happiness that marks some recent Scandinavian releases. Such as the Solid Base album which I reviewed earlier. And which, by the way, Supergirl dissed heavily because of its lack of bass. This is even more obvious, I would say, on Infinity's album. The whole compilation is very high, in almost any sense of the word. And so even the rhythm instruments start way above the cellar where the bass normally sits. In fact, I'd say somewhere on the living room table, comparatively. And it just goes up from there.
Yeah, yeah. I bought it today. The texts are not deep, at least not intentionally, but the music is so upbeat that I get ticklish all over. They've included my old favorite single "Feeling Good" and the breathtakingly uplifting "Happy" as the last two tracks. I'm not sure about the international distribution, but you can probably find out. The title of the album is, fittingly, www.happy-people.net And yes, that's a real web address.

Unless your religion forbids it, hi-hi-higly recommended. Add magenta strobe light, a warm Coke and a cold girl, and you're teenage again. Leave the chemicals in the cupboard, you won't need them.

(Want to see how Rosa the Daggerfall girl is dressed tonight? Click.)
(Note: Rosa pictures are not archieved on my web site. Click now or forever hold your mouse.)