So It Ends

I finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows last night. And all I could say is Wow. Okay, and what a book. It left me breathless but satisfied at the end. Very worth my Php 1,450 (less 10% because of the promo). Proper post in the next few days as I collect my thoughts, plus so I won’t spoil it for the other people who are still reading it. :)

Now I’m reading The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde. And I’m liking it so far. And I still have about 7 books from Doulos and the Book Season last year that I haven’t even cracked open. Good luck to my reading. :P

My computer is empty. It’s hitting me, finally. I know I can rebuild my music collection, much thanks to my friends, and I guess I will rewrite Fall Like Rain if I can’t find a backup copy of it somewhere. I do want to make some changes to that…

Anyway, move on, Tina.

(More…)

Stupefied

Yes, that’s Harry Potter language. I’m not yet done reading, so DON’T spoil me please.

An update on what happened to Ginger’s HDD — all my files are gone, gone, gone. Hay. Well, searching my old CDs, I do have some kind of backup for my layouts and my writings but it’s last May 2006. So anything in between that and now is gone. Except for those I managed to store and email online (thank you gMail for having so much space) and for Triskal for having my videos and my songs. And Multiply for keeping some of my pictures.

I’ve been trying to make some kind of inventory of the files I have that are either retrievable somewhere, someway and those that are not…and here’s what I came up with so far:

• MP3s - that’s 12GB worth of music. Maaaan. But thank goodness, they’re pretty much replaceable since 7GB of it is in Triskal. Maybe now I can choose which mp3s to store, instead of having a hard time what to delete.
• Photos - No new pics in between the year that I did not upload in Multiply, except maybe for the graduation photos, which are so few. Hmm.
• Videos - now thank God I have these in Triskal…but I did lose my copy of Thr3e and Meet the Robinsons. Plus Joan of Arcadia Season 2 Part 1. Ohwell. Back to torrents.
• Layouts - All the layouts I’ve done for the past year are gone. That’s really, really bad. :( I don’t have a backup copy online too since I deleted them already. That’s just sad. Oh well. I guess I can still reconstruct them when I want to make them again. And make it better this time.
• Old Blog Entries - This is also quite sad. I have about two years’ worth of blog entries stored in Ginger’s MySQL database, which I already deleted online. Goodbye. :,(
• Writings - I’m trying to recall which of the things that I wrote for the past year that were saved online through gMail or whatnot…thankfully, I think I have a full copy of A Page is Turned in my gMail, but I’m not so sure about Fall Like Rain. I might have to start that from scratch (hay), but then I do want to make some changes there, so I guess this is where I should start.
• Chats - Oh well, not such a big loss. I guess.
• Resume - in gMail, retrievable.
• Audiobooks - Oh well. :( Retrievable somewhere, I guess.

That’s all I could think of for now. Jomar put it nicely: refreshingly shocking. Yeah, it is. And a bit freeing too. I don’t know what else I lost, but I bet it will hit me in a few days but I’m ready. So I guess that’s okay.

Right now I don’t want to tinker with it yet because I want to install Service Pack 2 first before connecting online and installing anything else, so I guess Ginger will be quiet until Monday night, when I get home and do the recovery thingie.

Sooo. Back to Harry Potter 7, I guess. I’ll survive.

And yes, I will buy that external HDD. As soon as I get paid. Any suggestions what to get? How much is an external laptop HDD? The 80GB one? Or even 160GB? Is it more than 5k? Or should I just get a normal HDD instead?

No mourning for me, promise. But please do help me let go. Time to start over.

Stunned

My laptop Ginger decided to act up this morning.

It was working perfectly well last night, but when I turned it on a little while ago, I got a blue screen which said, Unmountable_Boot_Drive. I shrugged it off and restarted but I got the same thing. And again. And again. I can’t even get into the OS.

So I went online on my brother’s computer to check how to fix it…and they said that I should use my XP CD to repair it. I only have my Product Recovery CD from the laptop package so I inserted it, followed a couple of warnings that my hard drive would be erased, thinking that it will ask me once again if it will do just that, then it showed the screen that I always see when I was reformatting.

Uh-oh.

Then when it was time to insert the second disk, I put it in but for some reason, Ginger didn’t read the CD and the process was aborted. I tried restarting it again and now I’m not seeing the blue screen, but a warning that my LAN card wasn’t installed and nothing else.

Uh-oh again.

I have this really bad feeling that I have to reformat Ginger to work again…and yes, she is due for reformat.

But here’s the thing:

I DID NOT BACK UP ANYTHING! 

Okay, my last reformat was May 2006, and I do have somes files backed up there…and my iPod has my music and some of my videos. But that’s it! And I did not backup everything because I used my brother’s old iPod to save some of my files, which are all inside Ginger already…plus it’s been a year! My music! My videos! My photos! My just downloaded Joan of Arcadia season 2! My writings! My layouts! Gone!

I’m still stunned. I don’t know what to do. I turned Ginger off already and told myself to work on her tonight, because I’m about to go out and get Harry Potter 7 and go bowling with some officemates…and then I’ll go back to her tonight. I’m still hoping that I could recover the files inside Ginger, even if it’s only my writings and the web stuff I did…but I’m getting myself ready for the fact that I may have lost all my files. :(

Hay. Please say a prayer for Ginger for me?

The first thing I’m going to buy myself when I get my salary is an external HDD!

Contentment

PLUG: Switchfoot in Manila, September 10, 2007, Cuneta Astrodome. Get your tickets here!

Is it possible to be this happy and love my work when it’s not even a month? Is it possible to finally feel content about where I am and actually see a future for myself here? Is it?

Sometimes I’m afraid that this exciting and thrilled feeling I have about my new work will fade into oblivion after a few weeks of being stressed, that eventually I’ll end up wishing that it’s not Monday yet and want to move out…but somehow, I feel like I won’t feel like that. I feel like I’m finally where I really should be after 10 months of being on trial somewhere else. I feel like finally, things are falling into place, in the way that I want it.

And you know what? I think that God’s also happy because I am happy. Did that make sense? I just feel like He’s smiling with me right now, you know? :)

All morning, we were all on relaxed mode because we had no work requests, the afternoon got us working on some new sites. Then a new request came that frustrated me, but still made me laugh even so. :) The day was capped with the dinner at Dencio’s together with the entire team, our Operations Manager, our boss, the HR recruitment people who hired us and our trainor who has been with us all week. Fun night with lots of food, laughter and a round of beers for the guys. And I look forward to work again tomorrow because…well, just because! Is that even possible?

I’m not complaining, of course. :) I’m thankful, because like I said, finally, things seem to be falling into place.

Now how about a love life, Lord? Haha, kidding! In Your time. :)

A little while earlier, I was doing some Friendster hopping when I chanced upon the profile of an old female colleague. Apparently, she had a major update in her life (kinda like what I mentioned in the last line of the previous paragraph), and the people were commenting on it on her profile. What surprised me was, even one of our business partners knew about it…while, I, the officemate and usual lunchmate who she used to talk to a lot about it before, did not even know.

Come to think of it, I think they all still see each other and not tell me. How sad is that for me?

Then again…I have to admit that I had some kind of…um, issues with some of them earlier this year. I don’t know if I was just imagining those issues or if it is true because I never really found out if it is, and we never talked about it. It’s just sad that things have to be this way, or ended this way. I mean, I know I have friendship issues, I just thought I’m past them ever since college. I have this feeling that little issue kind of scarred me a bit, which makes me afraid of connecting with new people in fear of that happening again.

Maybe the entire environment where I used to be just so (pardon me) screwed up that I just don’t thrive there. At all, no matter how hard I try. Even if I lasted for ten whole months there. Maybe, maybe, as much as I learned there and was put into hot water and developed some kind of discipline that I have yet to see, this just proves that I’m not meant to be there for long.

So again, thank You. Because without You, none of this would’ve been possible. :)

Okay, last thing before I go to bed. Hi to my teammates who will be reading this tomorrow. Haha. And advance happy birthday to our youngest team member, you know who you are. :)

Bed time! I need to be at work early because I have a Switchfoot Street Team meeting tomorrow at 6pm, so I need to be out early. You can get your Switchfoot tickets here, by the way. :)

Thoof Your Personalized News

There is this one commercial for a local credit card which shows a rocker chick who is also a bookworm, a dedicated mom who is also a boxer, and the like. The commercial stresses that the company knows their clients personally, based on the purchases they made with the credit card. It’s cool how this personalization is done for most of the things we use right now, like the way Thoof delivers personalized news. Unlike other Web 2.0 applications, Thoof does not ask the members to rate the articles they read if it is good or not. Once an article is clicked, Thoof takes note of the clicked article, putting it as a part of your profile. If you think the article is not interesting, you can click on the “not interesting” link and it disappears from your profile. You may also add articles, share articles through email, edit some posts and vote if the changes done to other posts are correct. You may also choose to hide some articles instead of reading them and marking it not interesting.

I think Thoof is a cool way to personalize the news that you read, so you’ll only read things that are of your interest. Personalization at its best. :)

This is a sponsored post.