Thursday, April 29, 2004

On the homefront

In other news, my company is doing a 15% pay cut across the board (that's about 2 months salary). Remind me again why I'm taking a paycut every year instead of a pay increase? At least they're supposed to be catching up with my expense checks next month (they're about 8-9 months behind). Supposedly, I'll get taken care of and some of that monies will be given back in the form of a re-raise... but right now I'm not holding my breath. At least my car loan expires right about the time that the pay cuts hit, which will soften the blow a bit.

And speaking of reading material, the Dune series prequels by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson are actually quite good. The titles are House Atreides, House Harkonnen and House Corrino. The first two are a bit light, still worth reading, but the last one (House Corrino) is definitely the best of the series. These 3 take place right before Dune and set the stage and the players for what happens in Dune.

I also have the Butlerian Jihad (another prequel) sitting on my reading stand, but I'm having trouble getting into it. Ended up digging out my old copy of Dune to read instead (will probably roll through the entire series before I go back to the Butlerian Jihad book). Part of the trouble with BJ is probably that, unlike the other prequels, none of the characters are familiar and it feels like we've picked up in the middle of something. (When the story starts, everyone is already enslaved.)

posted by Wuphon's at 11:35 PM

Monday, April 26, 2004

Symantec Ghost Troubles

Ever since I put the new SATA drive in my A/V box, I've had horrid audio-video sync issues (audio is now lagged by 1/4 sec to 1/2 sec). I think I finally got that straigtened out (hint: when turning on/off the dynamic sync options in VirtualVCR, it helps if you restart VirtualVCR after making those changes) so now I'm trying to Ghost my WinXP install so that I can get back to this point should I have problems down the road.

Unfortunately, Ghost keeps throwing a Error Number: (29004) Message: Read sector failure, result = 1, drive = 0, sectors 1703399 to 1703423 error after it copies roughly 2-3% of the disk. So far I've tried the "-fni" switch to no avail. Also tried "-fni -ffx".

Ultimately, the solution was just the "-fro" switch ("Forces Norton Ghost to continue cloning even if the source contains bad clusters.") which allowed me to ghost the volume. So my command line for Ghost is:

ghost.exe -split=2048 -fro

Will see how well it works if I ever have to restore. Source data is 14-15GB, not sure how big that will be once it packs down (hopefully only 2-3 DVDs).

posted by Wuphon's at 4:28 PM