Ed Bilodeau

This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Thursday, September 16, 2004

# Whiiirrrr...clickclickclickclickclick...griiiiiind : These are the sounds that you never want to hear coming from your computer's hard drive, the sounds our home PC started making last night. I'm assuming the data on the drive is lost. The last backup is a few months old, but thankfully we didn't use the PC too much over that time. Still...

The plan is to purchase a new hard drive (I priced out an inexpensive 40GB model this AM) and install it over the weekend.

The PC, a Dell Dimension 4100, is just about three and a half years old. The warrantee, if I remember correctly, is about 3 years. Which is how it goes with electronics, I guess. I'm going to dig up the original paperwork to see if maybe the hard-drive had a longer warrantee. I may also see if the hard drive's data can be recovered, but it isn't critical data, so we don't plan on spending any significant amount of cash on it.

If we weren't doing our studies, I would think seriously about not bothering and just doing without a PC at home. Then again, if we had the cash, we would probably just go out and buy a new system.

Ed Bilodeau

Thursday, September 16, 2004

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