The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Well, I’m sure most of you read Erin’s blog, so you’re probably all up to speed on our exciting news for next year.  We decided to get a snake.  After long discussions with James we are going to name him Alligator.  Since the arctic isn’t really the best place for a snake we are going to move to Brainerd, MN.  Erin informed the local middle school that she’d be taking over one of their 6th grade classes for them. We are really excited to be near our friends Mike and Amanda who also live in Brainerd.  They should have a new baby by now, so hopefully Alligator will play nice with their new little one.  (The above is mixed with fact and fiction can you figure out what is real and what isn’t?)

So that was the good.  The bad began a couple of days ago.  I was working on an email when my computer began acting a little funny.  When I tried to send the message it would blank everything out.  The person I was sending to, the subject, and the message itself.  So I deleted the message and tried with a new message.  The same thing happened.  I deleted the message, closed Mail and launched it again.  The message popped up which it shouldn’t have done because I deleted it.  So it was still acting funny.  I opened up a new message and the same thing happened.  I decided I’d relaunch Mail again.  This time when Mail opened back up it told me that it was corrupted and needed restart itself to try to fix the problem.  It did this to me twice.  I decided it would be a good idea to restart the computer and see if that resolved the issue.  When the computer tried to start the only thing that showed on the screen was a folder with a question mark on it.   Not a good sign.  I brought the machine to PK.  He plugged it into one of his machines to work on it.  The only problem was that the partition that had all my data on it was not longer found.  The HD didn’t even know it had anything on it.  :(  Not good.  PK ran data recovery software on it.  The next day it was finished and we were able to recover all my data.  Which was awesome.  I hadn’t backed up in a while, and it would have been a bummer to lose everything.

The Ugly.  I spent the next day erasing the HD and installing Mac OS X on it.  It took me three tries for the install to work.  I thought it was a problem with one of my install disc’s.  So I got the OS installed, and worked late at work getting the updates all installed, and a few programs on.  I went home and started moving my files over and getting things set up the way I want them.  About 1:00 AM the computer started acting up again.  I restarted and it kernel panic’d on me.  this is where the screen turns gray and a message comes up in like 7 languages telling you to restart your computer.  This happens from time to time, so I restarted and it happened again.  After several tries it kernel panic’d every time right when it started up.  Not good.  So after spending the entire day trying to get it back up and running it was down for the count again.  I brought it into PK this morning and he just skyped me a big ago telling me that the b-tree was messed up on it again.  Having two of those in as many days is a very good sign that the HD is toast.  So now I am on a loaner computer waiting for a new HD to come in the mail.  🙁

I flew over to Koyuk today on the BSSD plane.  I am here to work with Koyuk students to broadcast the regional NYO (Native Youth Olympics) tournament.  We will be streaming it live if your interested.  I’ll update the BSSD website with information on how to view the live streams.