I have to go away for a while.  It’s time for the annual trip to the shore, again.  I’m leaving this evening and won’t be back until next Friday.  Unless I leave early, which may happen.  We’ll see.  If it weren’t for Cindi, I probably wouldn’t even go this year.

Anyway, don’t bother e-mailing me, since I won’t have any internet access.  If you need me, call my cell phone.  If you don’t have that number, you probably shouldn’t be contacting me, anyway. 

It’s been a while since I gave you people what you really come here for….

Bryan and baby

Two cute little girls

And finally, it’s bedtime…

Well, it seems that we’re back, almost as though nothing had happened. I’m much more paranoid about backing up now…

Things aren’t completely perfect, but I’m breathing a little easier. Thanks to Computer Troubleshooters, I have managed to recover the most important data that I feared was lost. Thanks to the fact that the majority of information I had in Outlook is saved on my PDA, I should be able to get back up and running with a minimal amount of work lost.

Gateway is supposed to be sending me a new hard drive to replace the one that died. In fact, it was supposed to have arrived today as I talked to a tech support guy first thing Friday morning and was told he was sending it out overnight. He was supposed to call me back regarding the new chassis that needs to be sent (to fix the problems with the screen) and when he did call today at around 4 pm, I mentioned that the drive had not shown up. He said that oftentimes when the parts department receives a request to ship something out overnight, they actually fill that order the next business day and then ship it overnight, meaning that, in my case, the drive won’t arrive until tomorrow. As Michelle points out, that’s hardly overnight. Needless to say, my love affair with Gateway is over. We’ll see how well these new parts fix things up and then I’ll decide if I’m going to get another computer or not. To be honest, while I would like a new computer, I don’t really want to buy one right now as I’d rather put that money towards other things. I guess we’ll see what happens. I mean, I do have another year of warranty on my current computer, but what good does it do me to have them fix it for free if it’s always broken? I’ll see what happens…

Kids? Another lesson…

Just because your automated back-up software says that it has backed something up, it doesn’t mean that it did. Sometimes it’ll back it up the first time, but not on any subsequent backups. Sometimes this will result in you losing 5 months worth of your business…

Alright, kids. Gather ’round. Here comes a little lesson from your Uncle Darren…

It turns out that your hard drive can just completely disappear at any time and for no good reason. Yep. Gone. All of it. Funny, huh?

So, what’s the lesson we’ve learned, kids? That’s right. Back up early, and back up often. Kids, don’t let this happen to you.

Hmmm…haven’t said anything in a while. Not much new to say. There is this though:

Have you noticed that all of the cheeses at Subway are white?