not my blog

So I’ve signed up for Google Adsense and Linkshare. Yes, I realize that makes me money grubbing, but I can live with that. After all, it’s not like a make a fortune at my job. Yes, I’ve said it, “I AM A GEEK!” Not that I can complain, I make a decent living and my family has a house and clothes and food. It could be a lot worse, I could work for that company the Big Blue Machine owns.

What that means to everyone (all two of you that are reading this) is that I drive around in a “spiffy” PT Cruiser all day and fix peoples computer problems. Well, if nothing else at least I have the spiffy GT model to roll around in. So it’s no Porsche, but at least it’s better than the base model the rest of my co-workers drive around (70 HP bump in a car that only has 150 is a big deal). And before you say it, no I am not some mindless spyware removing monkey. I have installed/configured/fixed everything from Domain Controllers, Exchange Servers, site to site IPsec connections and more. Not to say that I am the most intelligent person you will ever meet, but I’m not a retard either. Although with regards to that, I did have my first dose of Dell Indian Tech Support in quite sometime. Really it wasn’t all that bad, but I did basically tell “Abraham” to shut up and listen, “the hard drive is toast, send them their replacement.” I was quite impressed, they were actually going to have someone come out to replace the hard drive for my customer. Not that it does them much good considering my good friends at Action Front had this to say when they recieve the drive for data recovery:

The drive was found to have problems internal to the HDA (Head Disk Assembly). The unit was opened in our cleanroom / cleanbench (i.e. drive seals were broken per your permission on our evaluation form) to examine the unit for recoverability potential.

We think internal work (generally, head transplants and/or any other operations which may be required to get a one-time read) may have some potential for success. These are high-risk procedures used to retrieve data. The drive must be opened and worked on in a clean environment. If these actions result in the drive successfully restarting, we begin mirroring the contents of the drive (sector by sector cloning of the data to one of our own devices).

With the extracted data, we do a “logical reassembly”, to try to put the files and directories back together to get it as close as possible to its original state. These steps involve considerable time and resources to be applied to the problem to qualify recoverability. In addition, if a recovery is possible, there is a chance that the recovery will not be perfect. At the end of the process, we take a look to see what we have, and whether it matches the data required.

Quote for the recovery: $2700! Ouch, must be nice to even consider that much money to get data off. Of course, when you live in a 200 year old horse farm for part of the year and Conneticut the other part, you can consider things like that. That is always depressing, seeing how the other 1% lives. Of course, it kinda sucks that I am losing one of my best residential clients next week as he’s moving to California.

But in close, in honor of my friends in India I present: Tech-Support the cartoon!