Saved by a penguin

I am a Windows SysAdmin at work. I work with Server 2008, Vista, SQL Server, Hyper-V, and many more Microsoft technologies. So, when the hard drive on my wife's XP machine died, I turned to a few tried and true pieces of software to get the job done:

Recuva - I've recovered all kinds of deleted files with this app before, but it let me down this time. It didn't even scan the disk, because Windows was reporting that the drives were unformatted, and were 0 bytes in size. I figured that this meant that the partition table was gone, so I looked for a utility that would recover the partition table.

TestDisk - this software claims to be able to recover a damaged partition, but I guess that wasn't my problem. This utility found no partitions, and no partition backups on the disk. When I tried to recover any files at all, it gave read errors on every sector of the disk. At this point, I thought it was a lost cause.

A colleague of mine suggested that I try ddrecover , a utility only available in Linux. I had nothing to lose, so I downloaded a Knoppix Live CD, and booted into a Linux OS without actually installing it...

So right now, I'm posting from an OS running ONLY off of a DVD, and in memory. This fancy OS is reading the screwed up drive with no problem at all, and I'm recovering all the data that we thought was lost. *whew* I guess Windows just got a bit confused about how to read the drive, and all it took was a different set of drivers to have a look at the filesystem. In any case, my wife will soon have her music collection and family photos all back.

38% done the recovery of the first partition... time for Castle Crashers.

Crashing Castles and Computers

Last night, niether the wife nor I were feeling much like swing dancing. So we skipped out on our last class to grab dinner at a pub, pick up some books, and head home for a night in. "What luck!", I thought. "Castle Crashers at last!". However, when we got home and discovered that her computer wouldn't boot, I had other work to do.

It looks like the hard drive itself completely died. None of the utilities that I tried can find any paritions on it, and I'm getting nothing but read errors. My last hope is to boot off of a Knoppix DVD to try dd_rescue. I'm not hopeful, but it's worth a shot.

I got to play SOME Castle Crashers last night, and I definitely enjoyed it. Very nice art style, and the combat is as simple or as complex as you want to make it. You can mash the X button for quick attacks, or you can try to juggle enemies up in the air, chain together combos, use your magic attacks, etc. It looks like it could be very fun for newbies and experienced gamers alike. We'll see if I can convince the wife.

I'd rather be Crashing Castles...

I don't mind my job at all. In fact, I kind of enjoy it. I have a strong technical supervisor, a Director that can manage very well, and several extremely smart colleagues. I work in a nice office building in a fairly nice part of town, and I can see daylight from my cubicle. However, I just wanted to call in sick today to play Castle Crashers.

I've been looking forward to this game for well over a year, and the anticipation is killing me. It was available for download this morning, but alas, I have to go to work. Then after work, it's swing dancing. I may be able to squeeze in an hour of play before bed, if I'm lucky. Since it supports "offline co-op multiplayer", the wife is more than welcome to join in if she wants. When you take the game style of GoldenAxe, add in a unique art style, over-the-top action, customizable characters and unlockables, you get one excellent game! She will be powerless to resist!

Once I play the game for a bit, I'll post some initial impressions, and then write a full review. I can get pretty passionate about games, so rather than bore my coworkers and wife talking about them, I'll write reviews that people can skip or read at their leisure.

A+++ would camp again!

Camping was great! The weather was beautiful, the trails were nice, and the beer was cold. I got to make a nice towering inferno of a campfire on Saturday night, and we came home early on Sunday for volleyball.

The Billy Whitmore Experience ended up finishing 4th out of 8 teams, and that's OK by me. Everyone played really well in our final game, and we've even signed up for a fall season of court volleyball. There's nothing quite so satisfying as a well-executed spike, and now the wife and I are hooked on it.

Today, my boss suggested that I sign up for the company tournament to round out an IT foursome. Thankfully, we're going to be playing Best-Ball, and I'll be sharing a cart with one of the best golfers in the company. Little does he know that most of his time is going to be spent helping me search the woods every time I tee off. Sucker.

Food Tent Of Shelter +2

Everything was going smoothly for the camping preparations. Last night, we were bringing everything upstairs to load into the car, and my (very astute) wife noticed that the bag with the food tent was very light. FYI: Tent bags are much lighter if they have no poles in them. This was at around 9pm the night before we were going to need to use this tent. After searching my house, and my dad's house, the poles were declared AWOL.

On the bright side, I was able to find a nice tent on sale today. Behold the awesome new tent:

This one has canopies, and that's worth at least +2 points to Shelter.

3 hours to go until I get to take off to the Great Outdoors. I'm looking forward to this again.

Camping prep

You'll notice that the blog is sporting a fancy new theme and title bar, provided by my wife. Thank you, Jenn!

Why is it always so much work to relax? The wife and I decided that we wanted to go camping this weekend, and it's taken us the last two evenings getting prepared, buying food, cleaning and sorting our gear, etc. I tell you, this "nature" thing better be goddamed pristine.

A few things I'm looking forward to this weekend:
- Tallboys of cheap beer
- My camp chair (with footrest)
- A campfire
- A good book

All at the same time, with any luck.

What's in a name?

I feel I should clarify where I got the name "F3rret", since every single reader I have has asked the question. It all started a long long time ago, when I was playing Descent with my good friend and next door neighbour. We had installed the game, and it asked us for a "Pilot Name" to use. Rather than use the names our mothers gave us, we chose "Weasel" and "Ferret". Damn, we were so cool then!

I kept the name "Ferret" for a long time, until I branched out from dialup modem games to playing over the Internet. At that point, I realized that there were a lot of people out there who thought they were as cool as I was, because I found the name "Ferret" was taken on a lot of message boards, game servers, etc. So, I changed a letter to a number and wound up with "F3rret", and I've been using it ever since.

The only unfortunate thing about this name is that I don't particularly love ferrets, nor have I ever owned one. Occasionally people will ask me how many ferrets I have, and they sound very disappointed when I tell them I've never even handled one. Well, they either sound disappointed, or start calling me a fraud and get really irate. The internet brings out the best in everyone, doesn't it?

In any case, these fine fellows are the closest I'll ever get to owning a ferret, and I'm OK with that:

First!

So, after some gentle pressure from my wife, I have started a blog. She blogs frequently, and writes for a living, so her blog is actually worth visiting. My daily writing mostly consists of mocking coworkers over MSN, command-line server diagnostics and frantically hammering out "The Engineer is a spy!". When I pointed this out to her, she suggested that those are all viable topics to blog about, so I figured I would give it a shot. At least I didn't take Google's suggestion to blog about scooters:


As you may be able to tell from the first paragraph, I'm a bit of a geek. My wife, on the other hand, is not nearly as geeky, but she's getting there. She blogs, manages websites at work, and enjoys Rock Band, so it's a start. However, she's never really gotten into videogames as much as I have. Maybe it's because she went "outside" more as a child, or never had a Nintendo in the house. In any case, it's a situation I've been meaning to remedy for a while now. One thing I DO know, is that she and her brother used to enjoy Goldenaxe. That gives me something to work with, at least. Castle Crashers is coming out August 27th, and I think THAT will be the key breakthrough game. The only issue is getting her to sit down with a controller in her hand long enough, but I think I've got that sorted out...

This summer, I've been doing swing lessons. Here's how that came about:

(Dan at work frantically rebuilding a server, Jenn phones)
Jenn: Want to take swing dancing lessons?
Dan: (working hard, mild panic, not paying attention) Sure, whatever you say dear...

(10 minutes later, server fixed. Jenn phones back)
Jenn: We're booked!
Dan: For what?

So, since I'm doing swing lessons, I think it's only fair that she humour me by trying out Castle Crashers. It should play a lot like Goldenaxe, since it is also a side-scrolling beat 'em up. It's got a very nice art style, and we can play co-op instead of against each other. I think I've got a chance at breaking through with this one. Wish me luck.