If I thought you could find the way I would tell you go get lost.

[venta]

I don't think the world likes me very much today.

Number one: last month, I bought a dress from eBay. I realised yesterday it hadn't arrived, and mailed the seller. She tells me that she posted it, and a fortnight later it landed back with her undelivered. She has my address correctly, and it came with no explanation.

Much worse: number two. At the weekend I went to a wedding of a university friend. There were five of us who hung out together in that particular group: one married years ago, one has expressed his intentions of not marrying, the third was this weekend. That leaves Rachel and I. Rachel has been engaged a while, and was chatting happily about her own wedding plans.

It seemed the wedding was reasonably imminent - May - and I realised that I obviously hadn't been invited. "I take it as read you're going?" said Andrew in conversation. No, I said, I wasn't. I was a little hurt, but fundamentally weddings are expensive beasts and I guess you have to cut people off your list sometimes. A disappointment for me, but there we are.

The following day, it transpired that Rachel had sent out American style save-the-date cards a long way in advance, last July. "You did mark it in your diary?" she checked with me. Well, no.

I've had no card; the post office has obviously eaten it. Since the RSVP-inviations have not yet been dispatched, no one had realised I wasn't informed.

In the intervening months, that weekend has been booked with the rapper team. I briefly considered asking if I could welch on the commitment - awkward, but hopefully excusable - but now I remember that that weekend we have a bare minimum. We've accepted a booking at a festival, and for me to go to the wedding would involve the whole team backing out. I could do it, but I don't think it's a reasonable thing to ask.

Still, I guess weddings can take place without me. I just reserve my right to be cross with the PO about this one.

And today my giant external hard-drive, which houses my mp3 collection, appears to have eaten its own head. When I switch it on, it no longer spins up but emits a slightly melodious series of beeps[*] followed by a distressed crunching noise.

No, I don't have back-ups. My mp3 collection is the back up, since I only really keep mp3s of albums I own in phsyical form. Except... except for that one directory called Random_Shite. That was full of mp3s downloaded for free from band's sites, mailed to me by friends, and filched from message boards; some legit and no longer available, some stolen at dead of night. As a proportion, there's very few of them, but there were some gems in there.

Please don't be dead, hard-drive.

[*] Do hard-drives have POST codes ? I didn't think so, but can't quite work out what else it might be. I don't know its make/model (and getting it out of the USB caddy is a nightmare) so can't investigate what that particular beeping might mean anyway.

Comments

[kneeshooter]

Poor HD. I remember when mine died the other year it was the case/PSU that was deceased and I was able to recover the contents. It was a tough moment deciding whether to send it back under warranty sealed - with the promise of a new unit but no data - or go at it with a hammer.

I'm glad I chose the hammer.

Now all that data lives on a paired RAID setup. I couldn't face all that ripping again.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, I must admit that I hadn't really factored in the sheer time/effort involved in ripping hundreds of CDs.

I don't feel that I'm quite well-educated enough to go at it with a hammer; I'll take it into work tomorrow and see if promises of biscuits/chocolate/beer are enough to persuade one of our sysadmins to evaluate my options for me.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, what did you do with the hammer ? We've tried the, er, percussion adjustment here in an attempt to free up the platters, but no joy so far.

[kneeshooter]

I needed a hammer to get in the case. Then I plugged the drive into a spare cable in the computer and then used a Knoppix CD to get access to the filesystem and saved the files.

The point was that the drive itself was good; it was the PSU/onboard electronics that had died. It was a Networked HD rather than just an external HD.

[uitlander]

I believe you once gave me carte blanche to raid your mp3 collection at work. I only took selected bits and bobs, but you are welcome to rummage through what I have and copy whatever you like.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Thanks - however it's the recent acquisitions I'm going to miss most. I recently started buying mp3s from emusic.com - and for some reason I was convinced that they had a system whereby you could re-download anything you'd already bought. Hence not bothering to back those up... and now it seems that I've made that whole system up altogether. So ta-ta several months' worth of mp3 downloads, unless Davek can breathe life back into the HD tomorrow.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

for some reason I was convinced that they had a system whereby you could re-download anything you'd already bought.

Um... you probably got that idea because that's what they say they do.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, it turns out I've maligned them. I checked an arbitrary track I'd bought from them to see if I could retrieve it, and couldn't. However, that turns out to be the only one I can't retrieve.

There are several explanations for this, ranging between "they don't sell it any more" and "I am an idiot".

[lathany.livejournal.com]

That's all really naff and annoying. I expect better from the PO too.

[octalbunny.livejournal.com]

:( in general

That's the first I've heard of hard disks having speakers, but they have the logic for it.

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

There was a wedding in the UK for which I was saddened to not receive an invite, but I never had the courage to ask if my invite had been lost in the mail. I didn't want to risk putting the prospective bride in the position of having to explicitly deny me permission to attend.

Think I'd been living in England too long..

[snow-leopard.livejournal.com]

Number one: last month, I bought a dress from eBay. I realised yesterday it hadn't arrived, and mailed the seller. She tells me that she posted it, and a fortnight later it landed back with her undelivered. She has my address correctly, and it came with no explanation.

As someone who sells stuff on ebay I can tell you that this happens a lot (about 1 in 50 parcels). WHY I don't know (I have never been offered a reasonable explanation by Royal Mail)!

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Because they are not accountable for losing things that are not special delivery, and then barely. So thieves in the sorting office are not spotted, and postmen who leave parcels in bins instead of leaving a card don't get found out unless the householder opens the bin and looks in it. Also, many of the people employed to sort letters with handwritten addresses barely speak English, so they often misfile them, then they get delivered to a house with the correct number but otherwise completely different address by the postman whose bag they end up in in hopes that they will be chucked back in a postbox, and the person in the house throws them away or is one of these people who are so disorganised they have a 6-month-old pile of post behind the front door.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, how many of your hypothetical 50 parcels never turn up anywhere at all ?

I'm just curious... if feanelwa is correct and things are frequently delivered to the wrong address owing to being misfiled, then if fewer than 1 in 50 go missing then that suggests that the general public is quite diligent about returning them. Which I think would surprise me. Not that I think everyone is a thieving git, but am very familiar with seeing piles of misaddressed post lying around in people's houses having not been returned due to apathy/amnesia. Maybe people are more concientious about returning parcels ?

[snow-leopard.livejournal.com]

Well, if they do turn up Royal mail don't admit to it! Generally I file a claim and usually they send me some stamps as a 'gesture', ocassionally I get money back for the value of the item. Once the local parcel office 'discovered' 5 parcels that thay had of mine, some of which had been missing for months.

[(Anonymous)]

Oxford Royal Mail has a black hole into which anything which really matters is thrown, including recorded delivery letters (sender's sorting office explanation: the college porters don't sign for them. Oh yes they do, and put them on the parcels list, so were very annoyed). If you live in a shared household, Royal Mail says your housemates are careless with your mail.

[ebee.livejournal.com]

HLM might be willnig to help on this as he just procured a shiney new ipod so his old one with all its stuff may be up for grabs..

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ooh... good point. I've still got a few albums worth on my own mp3 player. I'd forgotten about that. It's a small fraction, but any re-ripping that can be avoided would be good.

But if you could persuade the gentleman to mail me Wot Italian again that'd be great :)

HD not quite declared dead yet, but is very definitely pining for the fjords, missing the sounds and generally fretting after inland waterways.