Oh, by the way...

Life is what happens when blogs aren't being posted.

Gamefly sent me Frontline:Fuel of War, but I've yet to play it. Life, work, diet and stupid issues keep occuring to block my game time. Maybe I'll have time today or tomorrow. But absolutely next week.

Just had a 500gb WD SATA drive crash and burn on me. I am not a happy camper about the circumstances and loss of data. The drive has been giving me problems for the past two weeks - generally, popping offline at odd times. Windows just complains about delayed write failures then takes five times longer than usual to shutdown or reboot.

So on Monday & Tuesday I unloaded the files from one partition and began the other. Trying to stuff gigs of data into other drives was going slowly, but ok. I started unloading data onto a USB backup drive and noticed a directory in the wrong place. Instead of waiting until it was on the backup drive I moved it immediately on the source drive.

Anybody wanna guess what happened next? Yeah, delayed write failure (despite disabling write-back caching - Windows never really does what you tell it to do), followed by MBR write failures. I crash the system and on power up get a disk check on that partition. Gets up to 11 percent on checking indexes and stops. No progress two hours later. Damn. Around 70gigs of music (an itunes backup plus other stuff) and 40 gigs of family movies & tv shows down the crapper.

Next up, download latest DLDiag from WDC. Basic test says FAIL. Extended test says FAIL but gives option to mark bad sectors/clusters as such to maybe get some useful space out of the drive. A few hours later - Fail. Can't write in SMART data space. Zero write test also fails. So, the drive is toast due to the SMART data space being corrupt/unusable. Great. Might be 400 gigs usable, but no, can't disable SMART, can't tell SMART to use somewhere else. Nada.

Check warranty. Expired last October. But WD offers a low cost replacement under a 'loyalty' program. $94 without shipping,taxes,fees,etc. Phffft! Local Officedepot & Officemax have them for $99 without taxes. Guess I'll have to bite that bullet tomorrow.

As for the diet, still fighting. Been having one or two days of ups that undo five to eight days of dropping. Kind of frustrating is an understatement. I've started calorie cycling, so maybe that'll help.

In case it escapes notice, the title is from the new Pink Floyd box set that has been released. 16 (!) studio albums. So if you don't have your fill of multiple copies of remastered studio recordings of Pink Floyd, here is your chance. The box set is available on iTunes for download, but as of now only the CDs are on Amazon.

Something interesting to note, the song "When the Tigers Broke Free" has found itself on the album "The Final Cut" between "One of the Few" and "The Hero's Return". Can't say that is a good place for the song, as I thought it was supposed to be part of "The Wall" album, but at last it is available on an album.

Ok, time to get into the game before watching Cloverfield...