What Are Your Memories Worth?

About three weeks ago I was up late watching the cricket on a Saturday night, thinking about my latest blog post offering, when the laptop started to misbehave. The normal reboot did nothing to fix the issue so I googled some fixes on the iPad and tried a few different things. A couple of hours later, frustrated not just by the cricket, I was struggling to get a resolution and went to bed.

Sunday Karren and I tried dozens of things but the laptop appeared to be cactus. We made a phone call to Apple and organised an appointment at the Apple store in Carindale. The Apple tech guru had a quick look, plugged in some diagnostic gear and determined that they needed to do some real work to get it going. It was looking more kangaroo edward by the moment.

On Tuesday I got a call saying that they needed to reformat the hard drive. For this to happen we needed to do one of three things;

1. Provide a back up of our data to be reloaded once the hard drive was reformatted. This was a little problematic given we didn't have a back up.
2. Agree to have the hard drive wiped and lose all data, including all our photos since the digital photography bug took hold - about 10 years worth or about 7500 images.
3. Pick up the lap top and take it to a data recovery specialist to retrieve all our data.

We had a think about it for a while and settled on a price for what we thought we would pay to get all our stuff back, in particular the much treasured photos!

Next we had to choose a data recovery company, there were quite a few and the first we contacted, were recommended by Apple. Initial quotation would cost $75, then if data was retrievable the cost would be between $800 for an easy job and $2000 for a difficult recovery. Wow... how much are your photographic memories worth? That made our decision easy, no way were we paying that.

The second mob I spoke to were prepared to analyse and quote free of charge, that was a good start! Then the rate for data recovery went from $250 for an easy job to $695 for a difficult job. That sort of makes the decision process a little easier. Painful but easier.

So I dropped the lap top off and waited for a phone call. The next afternoon I got the call I was waiting for. All the data was retrieved but it was a tier three recovery $695 plus a portable hard drive to store the data on. Costly but not as expensive as the quote from the first company. I was left wondering how many people would just go with the Apple recommended repairer and either pay through the nose or begrudgingly choose to lose everything? 

The lap top was then repaired with a new hard drive and I loaded all the relevant information back on to the repaired lap top. The whole issue took two weeks to get resolved from failure to being back in full operation.

There were two lessons in this for me, lessons for first world problems I admit, but lessons none the less.

1. If you have a PC or lap top with information you could not live without if your computer failed then do a back up. In fact the recommendation from the data recovery guru was to run two parallel back ups. The frequency of portable hard drive or storage disc failures are simply too high to rely on only one.
2. Always shop around for a second or even third quote. Third party recommendations or referrals are not always to be relied upon, particularly not this time.

We now back up our laptop each weekend, to two different hard drives. We discovered just how much stuff you keep stored on your computer that you never miss until you can't get it. Emails with tax information was one that bit me on the backside this time.

Back to the Garden

It has been quite a while since my last blog post, for obvious reasons! We have done a fair bit in the last month or so. Although the back garden is not finished we began out the front as well, we are at the stage where one of the major jobs - garden edging - require work in the front and back yards, with roughly 50 metres of edging to be concreted in.

Firstly we had to cut up the turf out the front and transfer it to the bare areas out the back, this took most of Saturday in the rain and a few hours Sunday, in the rain too. I shouldn't complain though because normally working in July in the rain would result in frost bite, chilblains and other nasty Wintery ailments. Thankfully none of that in Brisbane. Unfortunately after we had exhausted all our over supply from the front yard, we ended up about 10 square metres short of covering everything out the back.

Once the new garden beds were grass free we than had to remove all the old garden edging and salvage what edging pavers we could, then take the concrete and broken pavers to the tip. I loaded up the trailer with what I thought was a reasonable load, I was slightly over weight by my estimation but not dangerously so.

I got a nasty shock at the weigh bridge when the ticket was given to me indicating roughly 1050kgs of concrete on board, wow I was way over weight. The gate attendant told me it would cost about $150 to empty the trailer in one go, or I could empty half, then go out pay and go back in and empty the second half and pay much less. Brilliant, sixty bucks versus a hundred and a half for making a little diversion in and out was fantastic, simple and super cost effective idea. Or conversely a flaw in the tiered payment system easily exploited?

Paw-Paw trees are ugly

This weekend we ripped out the horrid Paw-Paw trees and replanted a Lilly Pilly hedge in their place. Photos will follow.

More Deer

We have seen more deer since the last post, more fallow, firstly a stag that had just lost his antlers.

Antlers gone...

Then I spotted these three multi coloured Fallow after dropping the girls at school, the colour variation was pretty amazing.

Three Fallow Does

The deer are incredibly docile and easy to get very close too, it is pretty obvious that the greater population of deer up here have not been hunted. The locals are getting sick and tired of the damage being done to gardens by the deer. The second issue is the number that are damaging the locals' cars as they wander into traffic.

Apparently the Brisbane city council have engaged professional hunters in an attempt to cull the numbers. In a letter to one such aggrieved resident, the local councillor stated that in the last 12 months more than 50 deer had been culled on selected private properties in Pullenvale. No doubt the local population is significant  in number and living predominantly in areas that cannot be hunted. As usual the answers to reducing feral animal populations are not easy nor widely acceptable.

What are you looking at?

Trials and Tribulations of the Postie

I am still enjoying the job, but it does have its challenges! Three things seem to be recurrent;

1. Dogs hate Posties. This isn't problematic for those responsible owners who keep their dogs on leads or in well fenced yards. Those that don't however are the bane of a Postie's day! I have already had the misfortune of running over a small dog!  Thankfully I didn't fall off nor hurt myself,  I couldn't have cared less about the dog, but it seemed OK and the fact that it barks at me each day from the front window of its house tells me it survived. Last week I had a run in with a nasty flea bag that seems to escape its back yard fairly often, it barks, growls and charges but is yet to bite. There is one other dog that is new to the area that is getting more aggressive each day. On Thursday it chased me  for more than 100 metres whilst trying to bite the mail bags on my bike. I need to be very wary and careful delivering in his area. Please remember to keep your dog responsibly and safe. Make sure it is restrained or fenced.
2. Is it Magpie swooping season? Graham seems to think so! Graham is a legendary local Magpie who each year in July begins a four or five month assault, initially on the Postie, then as he becomes more protective everyone. Each day I have to ride into and out of his attack zone twice as I deliver to each side of the road. The challenge when being attacked by Graham is to not flinch, keep your eye on the road and not worry about the constant whack, whack, whack as he flies above you smacking into the helmet and swooping past your shoulder. Initially I was being hit eight to ten times, now he is getting me 12 to 15 times and becoming more aggressive each day. He hates the Postie, but he is not alone...
3. A very small number people are completely anal and unreasonable about the nature strip in front of their house, even though they don't own it they are of the belief that it is their right to prevent you from legally going about your job, that is delivering mail on the footpath. Ropes, sleepers, rubbish bins, bricks, piles of rubbish and filthy looks are numerous. They need to understand I do have permission from the owner to deliver mail from the footpath. It is only grass, get over it.