Friday, May 31, 2013

Groundhog day in Hell

My disk drive failed. Last night I started the process of recovering a corrupted LUKS encrypted hard drive. I created a Linux (ubuntu 12) bootable thumb drive.

It took three attempts to get the computer. To boot.  I entered the crazy long password. The partition that holds root was marked dirty.  An fsck and it was mountable, but had thousands of bad files, irrecoverable I/O errors.

My important partition was apparently in better shape. I cleared some space on an external hard drive and started recovering what I could. 400 MB from a wonky hard drive to another drive over USB 2.0. This was going to take all night.

I plugged in my cell phone and retired with a book.

I woke, made a cup of coffee and sat down ready to receive the bad news. The screen went into death throws. The computer is pining for the fjords.

I was going to make a phone call, but... the phone was dead.  All night on a new battery with a new charger. I put in a second spare battery and it started charging.  Where are the workers who were to have been here at 7:30?  They showed up an hour later.  Ok guys, empty the cupboards and drawers and clean out all the termite byproducts. I will wait a week and see if the fumigation was successful.

Beto called, he is going to take a water taxi out here and look at my seized outboard.

Lining up the dead soldiers. I have one propane tank not empty. One more coffee and I will put it on the generator and have a cold shower.


A mechanic showed up.  "Jim, pull your boat back here, put down some logs for me to stand on."  He removed the foot from the outboard.  Seized.  "Put the flywheel cover on.  Put the cowling back on."  Laziest mechanic ever.  Off to town.  "Jim, carry the foot to my house, I can't."  WTF?  He outweighs me by fifty pounds.
More shit to take care of.. I popped back an hour later, the drive roller bearing was in pieces, the needle bearings were shot.   This is going to be expensive.   OK, how much do you want for that Honda 5.5 four stroke outboard?  $550.  Done, if it works.  I called my friend Chris, hey can I use that sailboat on top of Marita for a while?  Sure.  
OK.  Buy some chain, buy some padlocks, fix some computers.   Now mine won't even turn on.  Shit is breaking faster than I can fix it.

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