a song that makes you sad… ugh… i could pick anything from this man’s collection of work, his voice makes me tear up.  but this song guts me.

a song that makes me happy:

your least favourite song…

this was so hard to choose! there are a lot of songs that i hear that just make me go… UGH SHUT UP! so picking just one is tough.

so here you go. i hate.. HATE HATE HATE crazy frog… worst thing ever created… just having it on my blog is making me ill…

a meme i can do! because its all music!

Day 1: Your Favourite Song

my favourite song changes a lot but this song means a lot to me. the band muse has been a favourite of mine since i was first introduced to their music in 2006. this song brings back so many good memories and even a few bad ones. it holds a special place in my heart.

to ship my hard drive, i needed to have it packed a special way using an electrostatic discharge bag. this keeps the hard drive from being damaged by static electricity while in transit. i was told that this needed to be done or it would void my warrenty. so of course i thought this was something easy that i could find anywhere, WRONG!

first i went to a computer shop, because well… they build computers so maybe they’d have one laying around. esd bags are reusable so its not like its dangerous to use one that has been used in the past. but the computer guy would not give one up. told me to go to staples and radio shack. radio shack apparently doesn’t mind their staff not knowing the stock because the girl i asked didn’t even know what the bag was. (even if they don’t have one, they should at least know what one is, since they deal with electronics on a daily basis…) staples was a little more helpful but they didn’t have any bags that could fit the hard drive.

finally i decided to go to this old computer shop in town that we never go to because i guess my dad wasn’t really a big fan of them. he never really liked them or something i have no clue. i ran in, asked for the bag, they gave me not only a bag but a BOX to put it in, and even stuck the hard drive in the bag for me, shoved little holder brackets on each side that kept it from moving around (which was asked for in the packaging instructions) and sent me on my way, NO CHARGE! so yay score one for me. my shipping was all i paid and i finally got this thing on its way.

i had no idea that esd bags could be so damn rare! but now i know where to go if i ever need them again

after that i got mexican food at my favourite place, and some cupcakes from walmart. now its time to pass out and relax because its 81f right now which is insane for march!!!

oh and look at me! i double blogged!

today i pulled out the bad hard drive and later today we are sending it off so that i will get a nice new working hard drive in its place. upon opening my case i realized, oops i haven’t dusted in there in a while. ALWAYS remember to clean your computer guts! seriously… this new high air flow case i have should be called a high dust flow case because it was caked in dust, and i was a bit embarrassed to look at it! thankfully no one was there to see how awful it looked but i should know better.

cleaning out your computer case can help reduce the changes of serious computer mishaps. dust can cause problems with your fan speed, can mess up your expensive hardware, and can slow down your entire system. thankfully this wasn’t bad enough to cause any issues (the hard drive was a software malfunction not a physical one) but i shouldn’t have let it go that long.

if you’ve never cleaned dust out of your computer case, its really simple. my dad taught me how a few years ago and even my mom knows how to do it. all you need is a soft bristle brush, like a paint brush, move the computer into an area with some ventilation (because dust flying around sucks for your lungs as much as it does your computer), open the case up and just sweep away with the brush like its a broom. yes you can use a can of air on stuff but i have never been able to blast away dust as well as i can remove it with a brush.

this goes for laptops too! especially since your heatsink can get clogged and completely shut down your computer. don’t forget the awful photo of my heatsink dustbunny from a couple of years ago! eww…

this corrupted hard drive has been a nightmare. since yesterday i have been running EASEUS data recovery wizard to try to recover the data off of my F: drive which is completely dead. an RMA has been filed with western digital and i’ll be getting a new hard drive as soon as my hard drive is in their hands. thankfully i was in my warranty (its a 5 year warranty, and this thing didn’t even make it a year).

this recovery thing is taking forever though.. which has pretty much stopped me from getting on with things. i can’t do anything while this program is running since its taking pretty much all of my cpu power to run it. sure i can write this blog or surf the web, but i am a gamer and i have no games so i’m bored and watching tv for the first time in forever.

so needless to say, this is dull. i’m thankful that the rest of my computer is unharmed, i don’t have to reinstall windows or anything, and i can use my computer just not really because i’m running this stupid program. bleh..

after not even a year of having my awesome computer, suddenly a hard drive has failed. i have no clue what happened! everything was fine, i was hanging out on second life, decided to go to bed, closed programs, laid down, realized i forgot to open thunderbird (i like to check email as soon as i wake up) and the program wouldn’t open. that was odd so i went and tried to get into drive F and open another program. at that time i could get into drive F but it was slow, i tried to open another program and it told me it could not read the drive and that it was corrupted.

i tried to restart and preform chkdisk but it wouldn’t let me. it took forever to get to my windows log in and now when i try to double click on F it just tells me its unreadable. now i’m sitting here with a program running that is supposed to salvage things but i am severely worried. its not a hardware malfunction, as i do not hear the awful sounds that come with that, and it is found by the disk management tool that comes with windows 7, but it says that its ‘RAW’ which apparently means its unformatted or that something is wrong (yeah duh…)

so right now i’m sitting here while this other tool runs a scan on my giant 1tb hard drive, a scan which is probably going to take several hours. i am severely upset.

one thing that kinda stops me when i think about getting mental help is the fact that a lot of doctors just want to put you on medication. i honestly would rather not take drugs if i really don’t have to (i mean i’ll take them if they can prove i have a chemical imbalance, but not just because i am moody…) sometimes i think i just need a doctor to talk to and try to fix the rubix cube of problems in my brain.

the reason i’m bothered by medication and stuff is because i read a lot of stuff on the news about zoloft lawsuits or bad side effects and all of that stuff really worries me. there’s also the fact that i’ve never had to take medication before (besides cold meds or something) so i worry about not remembering to take them every day at the same time, since i tend to have weird sleeping habits and might not be awake when its time for meds!

i’ll take them if i have to. they just kinda scare me. i would do a ton of research on stuff before i start using them that’s for sure. not really looking forward to side effects. its pretty much going to happen no matter what i’d end up with. everything has a nasty side effect or two.

i know a lot of people who live in the city and they are always talking about how lucky i am because i live in the country and can have peace and quite… well i’ll just say, there is no such thing as peace and quiet. case in point, i was awoken to gunshots this morning. no not someone shooting someone, but some stupid person next door shooting a gun over and over and over again. not just bang bang they’re done. but several times over and over, rapid fire. i honestly cannot find the fun in this sort of thing… yes ok you are proud you have a gun.. or ok you are a gun collector and enjoy shooting things. but ffs, go to a shooting range. standing in your yard shooting a gun at nothing for 2 or 3 hours is ridiculous and so fucking annoying to those of us who don’t wake up at 9am on the dot.

to top it off, the gunfire always starts up a chain of dogs barking all around us. the closest of these dogs is not far from my bedroom window and it has the most annoying bark i have ever heard come out of a dog ever… after all the dogs are started up, someone almost always goes up and down the road and around the back pond several times on their 4-wheeler making sure to kick up even more noise pollution.

so no, its not peaceful here… its definitely not quiet. don’t envy living in the country, at least in the city you can get to places without driving half an hour.