Google's announcement that it will select a community to be hooked up to next-generation fiber-optic 1Gb/sec Internet service brought out a bid from nearby Greenville.
Fortunately, we spotted the news in time to sign up to be among the 2,000 black-clad geeks who spelled out Google's logo in color in the beautiful downtown Falls Park for the benefit of a video made by helicopter.
No, the town council didn't rename the city "Google" for a day, as did another city in the running. But with this demonstration, we hope to show Google that there is enthusiastic support in Greenville to be Google's city of choice!
The technical literature for computers has always warned that hard drives aren't perfect, and that when they go, they often do so abruptly. Enough trouble-free experience with them can make a person complacent to the risks. I resemble that remark!
Trouble is: I tried to do the right thing. Knowing that with a computer above six years old there may be vulnerabilities, I attempted to keep important data present both on my C: drive and on a (much newer) USB-attached external hard drive. That worked until my main hard drive filled up. Then I moved several directories of family pictures to the attached drive to clear space.
So naturally, it was the newer drive that failed, as it now contained the sole copy of years of irreplaceable pictures. Here is the tale of my journey out of perdition...
I googled "data recovery" and got several hits for companies that make that a business of doing that service. From reading their web sites, I selected one that seemed to have a professional approach and a picture of a physical address that suggested a robust business.
I filled out a request for quote online and was gratified to get a call within half an hour from someone who spoke good English and who, on hearing the symptoms, immediately suggested the same failure mechanism I had figured occurred (firmware failure). I got a formal offer by email for services, laying out what would be done & when, and the likely charges - with a note that they try to make 80% of all recoveries for under $400. (This was encouraging, because $400 is a number I had heard from friends who had had data recoveries before.) So I packed my drive securely and shipped it off.
The company's communications with me were excellent! I got several updates by email and a link I could follow to get the chain of custody in real time, as the drive went through the diagnostics and recovery attempts. Then I got a call that the attempts to make the drive "talk" were successful, and an email containing a list of all files discovered on the drive - a list that went on many pages. It looked good!
I should mention that meanwhile I bought a Ethernet-equipped 1TB drive and hung it on the home LAN, and ran backup software on the family's computers. I hope not to be caught unprepared again!
With my assurance that the data I hoped to recover was included in the file list I received, then the company made its pitch: it would cost over $950 to get the data moved onto a replacement drive and sent to me! When I could breathe again, I asked why the steep increase in the expected price? Well, the technician had had to flash the firmware twice. Now, I've flashed EPROMs and I have an idea of the effort that cost. Believe me, it is not commensurate with the increase! And as a retiree, I didn't have an extra grand lying loose about. So, I had them pack up the drive and send it back to me. That's it - no data recovery, no cost. For trying to skin me, they got nothing.
Discouraged, I let the drive sit in my garage over the winter. After Brenda prodded me several times about the old family photos, I finally overcame my lassitude and looked into recovery services again. This time, I found a site comparing data recovery services, where I read many horror stories. My first company had a 1-star rating on a 1 - 5 scale! Arggh! Shoulda looked harder, first go-round! So for my second attempt, I chose one* with mostly good ratings. As the drive failed in September and it was now February, I said I had no pressing time limit for a recovery, which would help keep prices down. This company took more than two weeks, made no acknowledgments other than that they received the drive, but eventually I got an email with a file list. Still looked good; at least Company #1 hadn't screwed up my drive in pique at losing the paying part of the job. And with a telephone call, here came the pitch: $384 to recover what I wanted onto DVDs plus $8/DVD! That's it! Another week and I had the data in my hand.
The moral here is to choose your data recovery service judiciously. Hah! No! That's not it! The moral here is to back up your data so you don't go through a story like mine... even if it did have a happy ending.
* Because you asked - Company #2 is called Gillware.
If you've visited some of the linked pages in this blog, you probably know that I am a frequent contributor to the growing catalog of public domain literature on audiobooks over at LibriVox.org. I joined that group just over four years ago.
A couple months ago I was contacted by a publishing company in Canada, I Publish Press, to ask if I would like to produce an audiobook for them. I immediately subjected this idea to the following decision tree:
(1) Read a book out loud? Well, yeah! I've done this over 40 times already and I like doing it! (2) Get paid? ??? YES!!!
As an additional inducement, they were asking me to do something current and interesting. Deal sealed.
The audiobook was being co-published with the print version. Both are out now. The book is "My Problem With Doors" by Scott Southard. The book starts with the premise that the narrator at an early age started to walk through a door in his house, and somewhere between the two sides was transported to another time and place. What's more, that behavior keeps up; he discovers that roughly 5% of the door transits he makes will whisk him away to yet another place and time. Lost past reasonable hope of return to his home and family, what can he do? In a thirty-year career of time-hopping, he searches for the meaning of why he, of all mankind, is subject to this anomaly. Good stuff!
The good folks over at I Publish Press only knew me from my LibriVox recordings, but they selected a good project for me. I was very engaged in the story and I hope that shows.
Now (shameless plug coming!) if this story premise at all appeals to you, I hope you'll mouse right over to ipublishpress.com and snap up a copy!
I know it's important as we age to keep challenging the ole grey matter, so that it remains tuned-up and ready to go. That becomes probably more necessary in retirement, as job challenges (thankfully!) recede in the rear-view mirror.
Soon after I retired, I decided I liked the decoding of "Cryptoquotes" which are published six times a week by my local paper. These are pithy or amusing or revealing short quotes, usually of well under 100 letters, accompanied by an attribution. The trick is that they are encoded. Each letter stands for a different one (today a "T" may used for all instances of "K", for instance) and the code changes with each puzzle. The challenge is to unsnarl things that look like "PXOKA GRTYY" to the actual message.
Since I am (was!) an engineer, it is never that easy! I created a template in Excel that lets me rapidly make trial substitutions in the message and easily change them if they prove wrong. I developed a cheat sheet of common 1-, 2-, 3-, 4-, & 5-letter words (and even some longer), and include stuff I found on code-breaking like the relative incidence of the letters, common doublets, triplets, and double letters, common prefixes and suffixes and contractions, and common words with repeated letters. Then I time my performance. And I think of ways to wring more efficiency out of setting up the cryptoquote. (I imagine myself competing against someone with a pencil, who can begin at once; I must first transcribe the quote to the spreadsheet and then link each letter to the first instance where it is used - which usually takes almost as much time as the solution phase.) And finally, I analyze the heck out of my performance!
For 2009, I decoded 271 cryptoquotes. I averaged 12.2 seconds to solve each unique letter, or 7.3 seconds for each total letter. For a normal quote of 66 letters, that's just over 8 minutes!
Charitably for you, I decline to bore you with the ranges, the standard deviations, or the graphs showing my performance improving over time!
Well, that's what they call themselves! (Ourselves, now.)
The Greenville Mafia was in past years a prime mover in the start-up of the Boardgames Players Association (BPA) twelve years ago, and indeed the incorporation was performed by one of our members, Scott Pfeiffer, a local attorney. The BPA is an international organization that draws 1400 - 1500 participants to its week-long championships held annually in Lancaster. PA. See http://www.boardgamers.org/ .
This gives me the weekly opportunity to play board games with some of the best players in the world. We have our own meeting house, and there are three plaques on a wall just listing the names and years of members who won 1st place honors at the BPA championships in individual events - dozens, in fact. With normal attendance at our sessions of 12 - 14, there are usually at least three different games in play at any given time. And these aren't Monopoly or Scrabble - these are euro games like Dominion and San Juan, war games like The Kaiser's Pirates and Napoleonic Wars, railroading games like Ticket to Ride and Empire Builder, and many others.
I may not ever attain the level of play of other Mafioso, but at least, after a hiatus of decades, I'm playing games again on a regular basis!
Continuing on the theme of fun in Greenville... A student from Christ Church Episcopal School conceived an idea for casting a series of metal mice and siting them in public-but-inconspicuous locations downtown. With inspiration from the children's book Goodnight Moon, he arranged the founding and installation of nine mice. Now, visitors to the city can pick up a hint sheet and go looking for these l'il guys while enjoying a walk down Main Street. We finally made the hunt in October. It was a unique and entertaining hike, even if it was marred by realizing some of the mice had been stolen or damaged and that we were seeing replacements. (Also, one was temporarily resited while construction proceeded at his station.) Here's our proof:
One of the delightful things about living near Greenville IS Greenville! Recently my sister Porter and her husband Chuck visited with us, and we made several forays downtown.
"Fall for Greenville" is a multi-night orgy of al fresco samplings from local restaurants, along with street entertainments like musical groups and improv troupes. The streets of downtown fill with merrymakers.
You can cool off in the fountains over near The Lazy Goat.
You can stroll across the Liberty Bridge and enjoy the view of the Reedy River Falls.
And you can stop by and enjoy numerous sculptures. Here, Charles Townes, Greenville native and inventor of the laser, reveals his secrets to us!
In February I wrote that a new group that produces an app for the Apple iPhone (www.travelingclassics.com) had launched with eight audiobooks, one of which was my version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I just checked back with them to see their current catalog. They're now up to 33 audiobooks, and one of the added ones is my rendition of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. Of course you can get all LibriVox audiobooks for free at www.archive.org, but if you don't want to wait on a download, or like to be read to on your iPhone (with the text scrolling in sync), Traveling Classics is the way to go!
Two weeks ago we finally put our house on the market. A day after it appeared on Zillow.com, we got an email inquiry from a fellow in Edinburgh, Scotland, who was with the U.N. Development Corporation and was being posted to the U.S.. He liked what he saw, but had questions: Did we have weatherstripping? Were there cracks in the walls? Other maintenance issues?
After about five more exchanges of emails, the man and his wife were sure: they wanted our house. They had recently sold their own house and could offer a cash contract (no contingency, hurray!) They would be in our state by the end of July to sign a contract, but they would have the New York office send us a binder immediately, taken from his hefty travel allowance.
Then we heard that he was posted to a 3-day conference on AIDS in Benin (Africa), after which he would visit the New York offices and then fly on to see us.
A few days later, a Fed Ex package arrived with three money orders of $950 each. It was never our intent to accept a binder to take our house off the market, and we had told him that; nevertheless, there it was, and it was more than the $1,000 he had said was coming.
So the next day we got an urgent email. The secretary had screwed up and sent more than she had been directed to, and now our would-be buyers were going to have trouble with getting to the States. (Are you beginning to get an uneasy feeling here?) So would we please wire the overage of $1,850 to his travel agent in Benin?
My wife, bless her, politely replied that there was no way we would send money, his or ours, to a travel agent in Benin. I probably would have been less politic.
Did you get the scam line? Send money to Africa. Yeah, sure, like we never heard of the Nigerians who wanted to sneak stolen government funds out of their country and only needed a little help from an American contact, for whom they'd split the take. (If you have ever fallen for such a scheme - I'm sorry for reminding you of a sore subject. I betcha wouldn't do it now!)
We started this exchange with the worry that it was "too good to be true." An Internet bite for a full price contract on our house the first week it's up for sale, in this market?? We decided to treat it as legitimate unless or until the other party revealed his desire to have us send money somewhere or give details of our bank accounts. But across half a dozen contacts, each with homey concerns like, "My wife is a school teacher. Will she be able to work in your state?" we began to trust. When the URGENT email came, although we knew not to follow the directions, we grieved some for a deal we hoped was going to be legitimate. Ah, well.
So I hope that this exposition will help YOU avoid being bitten by this clever scheme that relied, not on our sense of greed, but the building of a bond of trust.
Postscript - Some other things we discovered once we looked online for evidence of this scheme. We felt kinda good that the other guy was out the money for his Fed Ex package. Probably not so. It turns out these mailings are usually funded through stolen credit cards. So, if your identity was stolen, it might have been used to facilitate a scam to get major money out of someone else. The money orders? Faked. Close examination revealed giveaways, and online research shows that denominations of $950 are very common in scams, for some reason. There were over 3,000 complaints in one forum about faked money orders. Suffice it to say we ascertained that there is no such payee as shown on the money orders we got. Indeed, people targeted like us for scams are sometimes arrested for trying to cash these fake money orders. Check out Craig's List, read about money order scams there - you'll never want to accept a money order for anything, ever again!
