Another Visitor, Another Trip to The Orchard

My sister did leave over a week ago, but we did so many things that it has taken a while to go through all of the photographs. I had close to 700, and I whittled the group of keepers down to 230.

On her first full-day in Cambridge, the weather was promising enough for us to venture the walk across Grantchester Meadows to The Orchard at Grantchester. Although we were sprinkled with a light rain occasionally, the weather, while we were relaxing at The Orchard, was lovely. The daily rain and cloud cover, which we've experienced since May, makes one appreciate the hours or minutes of sunshine.

Carolyn thought the Newnham chemist shop was very quaint

Even on a gray day the Cam and the meadows are lovely.

Carolyn opted for Diet Coke instead of the traditional tea.

A friendly chaffinch

This chaffinch really liked my gluten-free almond cake

The Orchard's apples just beginning to ripen

Sisters surrounded by hollyhocks

Backup Your External Hard Drive

While I definitely love the aesthetic of my MacBook, I can't say that I think it's a better machine. There have been a few issues such as quirky battery life, compatability with certain software, the way iPhoto saves imported images in three places and doesn't let you view and chose images before importing them, and it's not recognizing male/female connected headsets. That's all I can think of right now.

My big issue is it's firewire bugginess. I was playing iTunes off the computer on Sunday night, and the majority of my music files were on my Seagate external hard drive. Well, I was in the other room and the battery ran out. I forgot that I had the external hard drive on, and I turned my computer back on after plugging it in. Turns out that my directory on my external hard drive was most likely overwritten. The MacBook wouldn't mount the hard drive, and it showed up as an unformatted drive on M*'s PC. I felt so ill. Almost of all of my music and all of my photos are on that external hard drive.

After much online research, I downloaded Data Rescue II as a trial and I saw all of my files. I was able to recover one file for free, and luckily the jpg was not corrupted. The only thing is that all the file names are gone. For pictures this is fine, as most were some variation of untitled. As for my music - well the thought of going through 5,000 songs and naming them just makes me sick (especially I can't identify half of them). I did read that even if the name is gone, the mp3 files should contain metadata with the song info. We'll see. It's my fault for not backing up my precious external hard drive. I've just bought one (luckily for the same price as in the States), and once it arrives, I'll recover my files using Data Rescue II (I'll buy it) to the new drive. I can send the old drive off to Seagate, and see if they can recover the file names. Usually they charge a $50 assessment fee, but since I'm sending it to their new Amsterdam facility, the fee is waived.

So, all will be ok in time. I've learned my lesson. Oh, the new hard drive is USB only. I'm not chancing the firewire connection. Apple even changed their iPod to connect via USB vs. firewire. Guess I should have suspected something.