Eredien's Journal

Taking a page from rax:

To buy sooner rather than later:
New SSHD for eee
Glasses (closeup and distance)
Digital Hygrometer/Therm. for Tokai's tank
Printer paper and Ink or professional business card printing 250 cards on order from vistaprint
Updated shade + finial + bulb adapter for restored antique lamp from great-grandmother K-Mart, of all places!
Sheets for my bed
Notary Public Exam Fee

Video games to buy eventually:
Wario DIY Wii
Replacement Pokewalker for the one I lost at the farmer's mkt
Pokemon Black or White?
Okami Wii/DS?
Fire Emblem Gamecube/Wii/GBA?
Gamecube controller for wii

Other stuff to buy eventually:
Silicon Dawn tarot 2x
An apartment
New modular bed+awesome futon mattress of awesome
Mac Webcam xBox Live webcam works natively in Mac for $10. Awesome.
Butterfly Socks

To find:
DS Charger Yeah it was in my DS case ...

To sew:
Dog coat + Hem B.'s jeans
Doll clothes
Baby hat for B. and L.
Bike basket
Redo world's worst-diagrammed crossstitch
Winter hat pack items
Mending

To list on ebay/craigslist:
Freaking model horse collection argh just break into your own storage unit by remembering that your parents' good intentions will never actually lead them to put aside the time to do things they said he would do with you
Spare piano (don't ask); remember shipping deal w/local piano movers Report craiglist scam to craigslist

To write:
Absinthe Writeup
TY notes to people for whom I have petsitted, for asking for a review
WWIA notes digitization
WWIA chap 5
WWIA chap 6
Email replies to friends
Write 3rd stanza Tesla in Love, don't worry about 1st stanza rewrite yet
Writeup and Submit Sumptuary to GURPS company
Movie/Book writeups: Philadelphia Story
Movie/Book writeups: all the crap I read this spring in the hospital (The Picture of Dorian Gray, Winter Triptych, Bird Friendly Building Design, Washington: A Life, Sex on 6 Legs, Jack Reacher novels, Sew-What Pattern Free Bags, Battle Hymn of Tiger Mother, Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, Animals Make us Human, A Fair Maiden, Goon Squad, America: You Sexy Bitch, Off the Cuff, One Man's Garden, At Home)
Ulysses writeup one good book
Gecko article
Revise sword in the hand
write up sword in the hand
post sword in the hand
Review of Dog Stars
Peachberry pie, 3-tomato eggplant parmesan, and stirfry recipe writeup + carrot-saffron risotto and sweet potato soup
Salty Mango Lassi Ice Cream recipe writeup + photo to flickr, LJ
Writeup of MWPAI exhibits

To read:
Finish Hare w/Amber Eyes
Restart Ulysses
Find public-domain bilingual copy of Brothers Dostovesky, read once Ulysses is done

To website:
Catification writeup + submission
Website design - doesn't have to be fancy, check pininterest re: color schemes
Addon website for Paws & Claws petsitting
Twitter design - should mirror website
LJ design - should mirror website - embed?
Upload final foxes video to Youtube, Flickr
Upload historical local house photos to Flickr in new set, email url to historic preservation people
Upload baby shower photos to Flickr, email url to C & B
1 hr Help mom with photo upload/CD burn
Upload B. bd party photos to Flickr, email URL to Bethany
Get Genderplayful setup with winter hat pack items
Email butter lady for mom
Fish photos, drop off camera to process scan in photos, upload to Flickr
Upload cat show photos to flickr
KeePassX

To design:
Business cards for Paws & Claws petsitting

To post:
Business cards for Paws & Claws
Return ASL DVD to library, get ASL book instead

Games:
Take Go books out of the library again, but this time one at a time
Continue playing through chapter-end book questions on Goban
Play Glitch again, determine if I still want my acct. there This game looks awesomer than ever; too bad it's too slow and keeps crashing my browser.

Jobs:
Notary Public Exam
MCPHS? list pro and con, talk with Peg J.
Check w/BMC CDO
IDG Copy Editor Framingham
Cooking vegan shit in Boston
Call back NH library though chances of hiring are slim since budget did not pass Yeah they hired people already
Catsitting gig 13th-Oct 1
Syracuse Public TV
Check out Peace Corps as a committment for various mental health and dietary reasons I don't think this would be a good idea for me at this time; something to keep in mind for future.
Sub. teaching
Hamilton Editing Position
Spring farm cares

Places to volunteer:
Call back zoo Docent Orientation Oct 14th
Call Boston zoos re: volunteer program http://www.zoonewengland.org/page.aspx?pid=242 apply for Keeper Aide when I am in the area
Get back in touch with BMC gender activism people - try emailing admissions again; get in touch with Wellesley & Holyoke alums
to this end call Rachel D. in Albany

Other things to apply to:
Financial aid for NBSS
Application for NBSS for spring 2013 pres. carpentry program
Tufts summer school session again should I again find myself in Somerville
Clarion 2013
Traditional Building Master's Deg. class at Boston Architectural College

Music:
Perform Für Elise for A. and B. while they are here This didn't get done
Finish composing "TimesNR" in Wario DIY & output to interwebs
Relearn Moonlight Sonata
Call Tina re: piano/organ lesson swap for vegan food? Left email for B.
Fix iTunes (Japanese & Russian transcription error correction, add correct composers for Holst & other classical for sort error correction. Upload entire CD library. Transfer cassettes not avail. on Amazon to MP3. Otherwise buy slowly w/change off of Amazon MP3. Sync iPod to use at gym.)

Exercise:
Go to the gym everyday. Use the time to listen to new music and relax. You don't have to prove any damn thing and if someone tries to make you guilty for spending time on yourself screw it.

Health:
Call foodstamps people and say your father is withholding necessary application info from you out of, apparently, sheer and total personal incompetence. Ask for next steps. Don't be embarrassed; It's not your fault the information has been withheld. Remember that getting rid of food insecurity and into food security will help you. You deserve to eat healthily. Read this article as many times as you need to to make the call.

Consult lawyer (K.?) to ask about statute of limitations on ENT doctor in Indiana who pumped me full of allergens after hospitalization Email K. again Look up stuff K advised me to

Call dojo that offers 1st month free + women's discounts to sit in on a muy tai or taichi class 6 pm beginner's class today Save up $ to restart martial arts

Call Alicia for Coffee

Pin down Brenda and mom for cat show times on 16th Sept. Hahaaa this is so not going to be decided until day of, but I try.

Call P. tomorrow re: catsitting 3 pm appt Sun done

Call D.K. re: fixing broken earrings Call Goldmine or Wilcox's jewelers & get rates Bring earring by, get estimate. Pick up fixed earrings

File:
Remaining stuff in filing cabinet.
Remaining email update list.
Combine buystuff email and personal email
Get new addresses for friends; update in Address book. Sync AB with iPod.
Sync AB with Google
Sync email list between private + personal email addresses.
Update all the accounts.
Stop Serbian hacker

Money:
List all accts in Manilia setup
List all accts in Mint
Balance checkbook + savings accts
Begin paying back remaining interest-bearing debts - call if necessary DONE
Begin paying back personal debts

Gender:
Tarot from Orion?
Consult self re: pronouns at end of year?

So, a while back I used Secure Data Recovery of Boston to get estimates for recovery of two hard drives of mine that had failed: a 1 TB Mac backup hard disk in its own enclosure, and a Linux laptop with a hard drive with a bad partition and several other good partitions.

They offer free quotes--basically, they examine your drives and tell you how much it will be to fix them. If it's too much, they just send your computer back. They looked legit, and were endorsed by a bunch of well-known people as well as local companies.

How to get an estimate:
It was trivially easy to fill out the form on their website (1 for each hard drive), and there was a nice automated response the next day followed up with a personal email from E., the technician. But it was all downhill from there.

The process of dropping off the drives:
I didn't mind going on the train to a swanky office building in Boston to drop off my laptop and my hard drive. I thought it was somewhat funny that I was mistaken by the first-floor security folks for a bike messenger dropping off some big company's computers and asked to go around back and up the service entrance, but looking back on how my case was subsequently handled I think that maybe that was just a symptom of a larger problem.

The process of getting a firm estimate of how much my HD recovery would cost:
I got an email on 9/20 telling me an estimate was ready, and I should call E. the technician. I called him, and he told me that the estimate wasn't quit ready yet. Two days after I spoke to E. on the phone, I followed up with another email, on a Thursday. I got a reply email on Monday with one customer ID number and one price--but the next morning, early, I got a cost breakdown. Unfortunately, it was too expensive, so I asked them to send the computers back to me.

The process of getting the hard drives back:
The 1 TB hard drive was mailed back to me in a relatively straightforward fashion. Since I had my mac mini set up and didn't want to risk further damage to the laptop's HD and the backup mac drive was basically unbootable, the drives sat in storage until the middle of December, when I opened up the box and found--my 1 TB HD, its enclosure and power source, and no laptop. (I freely admit not checking the box was an error on my part, but it was not a high priority task).

I sent E. an email with my case number from the estimate, and didn't hear back. I sent E. another email a week later, after calling and speaking with T. from Customer Service, who said E. was on holiday for Christmas, but had folks checking the storeroom for my laptop. I emailed E. again in early Jan., and got a reply from him the next day stating they were still looking for my laptop. I was worried--they had my case number from their ticketing system; they knew I'd had two computers; what was there to look for? Several days later, I sent another email to E., with identifiying details of my laptop just in case. He replied back, "What is the make and model?" I rather panicked--surely they should have that information in their system, and if they didn't know the make and model of my computer, how the heck would they have known what they were supposed to be have been looking for all this time? I sent E. an email with the information he requested, and 2 days later got the following: "They are still looking for it. Based on the tech notes we only have an
external enclosure for this case. I will keep you updated." External enclosure? Case? It's a laptop; you already sent the one with the enclosure back!

At the end of January, I sent another email noting that I was getting angry and grumpy. A day later, the reply came: "They are still looking for the notebook. We will have the final answer for you today." I didn't hear a thing. I sent another email the next day. I waited. I sent another email two days later.

I got a call from Eric, who was very polite, and also said they couldn't really find my laptop in their system per se, and transferred me to someone in the sales department. I happened to mention to the salesperson that when I originally sent in the estimates, I sent in one estimate per computer, and surely those estimates were trackable in their system, even if the ticket numbers they had for me appeared to indicate that I only dropped off one computer? I heard a little typing. Salesperson asked if he could call me back within 15 m. He called me back within 5 minutes, and said they'd found my laptop, said it had a different tracking/case number that had been misfiled, and apologized and said they'd send it back.

Unboxing: I got the laptop in the mail today. I opened it up (learning from my earlier mistake) and took the hard drive mounting screw off the bottom where it had been taped, screwed it back into the laptop case, and booted it right up. I got a really low-level error basically saying, "where the heck is your hard drive? Reconnect the cable; there's no OS here." I opened up the hard drive enclosure, and found out that while my laptop had been returned to me, it was returned without the hard drive.

So, I am still not done dealing with the inconvenience this company has caused me by their incompetence and forgetfulness and lack of attention to detail; timewise, I would actually have been better off had I not taken my drives to be checked at all.

I have a dump of all the data on my hard drive, but there's so much and it's so raw that it's basically useless. I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to afford to get back some of the stuff on that borked partition, but it'd be nice to at least have the opportunity to get some stuff off the non-borked partition.

Summary: Though everyone I spoke with was unfailingly polite, it was ridiculous that I was strung along for so long and now have another problem to deal with because they forgot to check my computer had everything it came in with. If I do ever get the bags of money needed to recover my hard drive, I won't be bringing it to Secure Data Recovery of Boston, because even if they were to competently fix my hard drives, I wouldn't ever be sure of getting them back in a timely fashion.

So, I have been playing Pokemon lately in between reading and applying for jobs (I am trying to teach myself C++ on a Mac; does anyone know how to get a Mac OSX compiler? I thought I could use terminal and unix, but it turns out that Mac OSX doesn't like me giving its terminal Unix commands. I hear you can download something called the "Apple Developer Environment" which will give you a compiler, but then you have to apply to be an Official Apple Developer, which I really don't think I qualify for. So annoying).

I have beaten the elite four (it turns out you're supposed to do this at the end of the game, not 3/4 of the way through, but I am tops at resource management in-game).

I am currently raising a bunch of berries and trying to get extra-special event pokemon and legendary pokemon and stuff like that, and level up some of the lower-level higher-level characters I have (eg, my Steelix at level 53 and my level 42 Staraptor and my level 38 Haunter, but most of my other "basic" pokemon are in the high 50's or early-high 60's.

I don't understand how to get more money for things like pokeballs after beating the elite four. I'm trying to do a bunch of side battles and capture a bunch of pokemon, but I keep running out of money to buy pokeballs, which is kind of a ridiculous problem to have at this point in the game. This is a problem as I need a lot of expensive high-level pokeballs to catch Mesprit and Cressilia. :P

I am also trying to win a bunch of contests to do another side-quest, which is a pain in the butt.

I also got all 28 Unowns. Apparently the reason why people want all 28 is because you can then get seals for all 26 English letters plus ? and ! and seals on pokeballs up your awesomeness in contests somehow.

I somehow got Heatran and the Giratina with pretty much little trouble, and am having a devil of a time with Mesprit, who runs all around the map.

I am trying to get a bunch more legendaries, but some of them are hard to do without having been at a Pokemon event in Tokyo in 2007 or NYC in 2008...

I can also apparently wake up Regigias and battle him, but only if I have the other 3 legendary golems from another game which I don't have. Blech.