Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Bill W. Loses His Job
Some sad, though perhaps not unexpected news: Bill W. has lost his job as a tech writer for the firm he has been working at for the past three or so years. The hard times continue for the Canadian IT industry it seems.

This may well end up being a plus for Bill, since he confessed recently that he was getting tired of doing his job -- he's very good at it, but he felt as if he was getting into a rut.

Dead Hard Drive
Grrr. My 40GB Fujitsu hard drive is very, very dead. Little did I know at the time that this was apparently a fairly common problem. Last week it had started up with messages about bad sectors on the drive, and one morning I heard it “ticking”, which to me sounded like the scanning heads were gliding zombie-like back and forth across the platters. Uh oh.

I brought it in to the office for diagnosis by the experts. At first the thought was that the controller board on it was fried, but after replacing it with another controller, we couldn’t coax the physical drive into talking to us. Dead drive.

Argh. That was my “storage” drive for a couple of year’s worth of BBC and CBC radio shows -- along with a bunch of my own "Mondo Music" shows from tape -- that I had recorded on to it. All gone. Phft.

Fujitsu has a good online RMA process, though they only offered me $118 for the drive. That may be the price for an OEM replacement, but it cost me $140 for an equivalent drive retail. Will send them the bill along with the drive and see if they are willing to cough up a bit more.

Oh well. Will still try to see if I can coax something out of the drive before I send it back to Fujitsu.

Things do work out for the best though. I plan on using the new drive to have a dual boot system, running both Windows 98 and Red Hat Linux 8, the latter so that I can really start playing around with that OS at home.