Geeks,

I’m looking for someone with the skills (and software) to recover some data from a seagate barracuda 160 that was soaked in the water of a firefighter’s hose.

Assignment:

My friend’s house burned down a year ago in the middle of the night. The videos and photos he shot of his kids from birth to 3 years old are on this drive. Your job is to recover as much of this data as possible.
Context:

One person has already tried and failed.

Further context:

He was about to send it off to some bigwig company and pay a bigwig price. He’s willing to pay to recover these memories.

Limitations:

He would like to turn in a receipt to his insurance co., who would cover a portion (not all) of the cost. His timeframe for turning in receipts to his insurance lapses in 3 weeks. If your cost is low enough, he may forego turning in the receipt, which would alleviate the time crunch.
If there are any takers, hit me up at my email. I’ll provide more details there.

Here are some of the conversations had and/or overheard at last nights Geek Gather:

• Eric discussed the state of selling Apple in enterprise environments.
• Eric also brought his iPhone along and everyone took turns drooling all over it.
• iShared a bit of the iLife love.
• I also mentioned I got one of the shiny new iMacs to replace my eMac.
• It was also espoused that most people, more specifically, IT people are self involved, thick headed idiots in general. Present company excluded of course.
• I talked about how I found Ubuntu’s versioning schema interesting as it works by year and month of release as opposed to the traditional methods used by other companies.
• Finally, Tim has now hooked us all on Top Gear. A UK car review show with a wicked sense of destruction.

I actually saw an advertisement I wanted to click on, from Slashdot no less. Patrick may find this interesting as well.

rsync.net does offsite backups for Unix/Linux, Mac, and Windows with open-source tools, open policies, available geo-redundancy, and encourages encryption. Even their pricing is straightforward: $1.60/GB single or $2.80 redundant site with unlimited data transfer and discounts up to 60% off for 1TB/Mo. Even their tech support is open, unlimited and always answered by an engineer, not some ticket-bot or Tier 1 lackey.

You can even mount your rsync.net space directly in your filesystem to make backups even easier. Very interesting indeed.

Ok, bear with me on this for a minute…

Several years ago I worked very hard to bring a nicaraguan potter to my former school to do a 6 wk residency with my students. Cristina was an amazing woman, potter, community leader, social reformer, etc. (I’ll tell you all about the way she led a group of 13 women to create a female pottery cooperative in her small town).

Shelley and I eventually went down to visit Cristina in her element and got to know her family.

3 years or so ago she got sick and couldn’t work anymore. After a year she couldn’t walk. then she was diagnosed with an inoperable cancer and died in May. I’ve sent money to offset the cost of pain killers and have helped in other ways. Her two daughters are studying with scholarship at the university, but she still has one in grade 7 and one in grade 4. The daughter studying Business Administration asked if I could somehow get ahold of a used laptop so she wouldn’t have to pay by the 15 minute interval to use the university computers (remember when it was like that here?). She has many papers to write and the cost is unjustifiable when the dad’s low income has to support the whole family.

I promised nothing, but thought, “now this is a job for the geeks!”

A friend from brainerd who owns land in Nica-landia and also knows the family would likely take whatever I can scrounge together down in January when she goes for her vacation.

If you have any leads, or better any old paperweights that will run xp with sp2, then fire me an email.

See you all next Tuesday.