Last night, I ran into all sorts of strange behavior on my laptop--unable to log in, normal system calls taking forever to complete, and all sorts of network trouble. This morning I backed up my home directory to my work computer's hard drive (discovering, in the process, that NTFS disallows all sorts of common and innocuous characters in filenames) and ran into several IO errors. Checked the hard drive and (despite SMART claiming everything was fine) it failed the read tests almost immediately. I managed to swap in a new drive and restore most of my files to a fresh copy of Ubuntu (with a customized version of tar to overlook the errors in the archive I made), but I still lost a fair bit of data.

Question: Why can't tar take an argument to skip over damaged sections of otherwise useable archives? A few IO errors at the beginning of the archive doesn't mean the remaining gigabytes of data are unrecoverable...

To recap the events of the past few weeks:

Aphyr.com suffered a brief span of amnesia due to faulty ram, which has since been replaced. Everything seems to be working great now. In the meantime, I've started working at Sys/Net, which is much more fun than tech support. It's chaotic, unsupervised, and way the heck too much fun. Running around with cable testers, patching in ports and messing around with DNS is my kind of job. d=('_`)=b

W00t w00t! Looks like it was just the bios that got screwed up. A quick reflash did the trick. There were a few loose inodes on fsck ("/ has not been checked in 46091 days, check forced"), but I can attribute those to the power failure.

Now, on to the paper of doooom!

This week hasn't been especially good for me, but I'm somewhat amused at the fortuitous timing of last night's storm. The power got knocked out briefly last night, and when I came home I found my computer shut down with a note from my roommate:

"Your computer was making beeping noises so I turned it off."