I promise this is the last post to mention my current hard disk woes. At least I think it is. I let R-Studio run over night. Woke up today, went to the computer and saw, “R-Studio has encountered a problem and needs to close.” Sigh. I think I’m giving up at this point. To the best of my recollection, nothing that was lost qualifies as essential. Time to move on.
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Once in a blue moon, HK can still do something right. And I don’t want to be only negative in my commentary on HK topics. So today … SCMP reports that The Donald plans to introduce a series of measures speeding up conversion of old industrial buildings into homes for artists’ studios and workshops. This is something that is badly needed here and it will be great if this succeeds.

In today’s letters section, a Mr. Paul Kokoski of Hamilton, Ontario has taken the trouble to register his opinion on the subject of euthanasia. He tells us that pain and suffering at the end of one’s life is part of God’s plan, that those who are gravely ill and request euthanasia are really just asking for love and a lot more hogwash along those lines that I’m not going to bother repeating. Apparently Mr. Kokoski wishes to force the tenets of his religion on everyone in the world. How nice for him.

So a deep scan of what should have been the E: drive, using Recuva, reveals only files on what should be the C: drive. Clearly I didn’t shut down the computer soon enough once this process kicked off. I’m gonna let R-Studio run overnight on the same drive and see if it gets any different results in the morning.

Jeez, I’ve already got 5 external RAID drives. Now I gotta get one more? Or see what’s there that I can lose. Jeez.

Well, TestDisk thought it found the partition and could restore it but on reboot, Windows didn’t see it and thought the drive was still raw.

Find & Recover could find the partition and tried to mount the drive but that just made both Windows Explorer and F&R hang.

But both of these told me the same thing … a 750 gig disk that my computer was trying to refashion into a RAID mirror (if that’s the correct term) for a 500 gig disk. So both programs only saw the existing 500 gig partition and couldn’t find any older partition info.

I’m trying Recuva now. Doing a deep scan. Maybe it can still find individual files. Says that scans for large drives can take “up to one hour” but says that mine will complete in 5 hours.

If that fails, I’ll try R-Studio. After that, I’ll just give up.

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.” – W.C. Fields

But this is interesting: The computer couldn’t boot from the C drive so I reinstalled Windows. Since there is already a Windows directory, it got installed to Windows.0. And when I rebooted, I got a boot menu with two choices – WinXP or WinXP. Going with the second choice, I’m back in my old Windows again, with all apps seemingly intact. Could it be? Just adjust the boot menu to get rid of the “new” XP option, delete out that folder, and I’m good to go without having to spend a week redownloading and reinstalling everything? Well that’s one small favor anyway.

Me and hard disks, we just disagree.

Not gonna go into details of how I screwed up because it’s too embarrassing but some of you will read this and be able to figure it out. Anyway, I have a C drive that’s two physical drives on RAID1. “C1″ directory, index, partition all wiped. Computer thought “C2″ failed. But mounting C2 via a SATA USB box on my laptop, I can still get at My Documents, Shared Data, Application Settings, iTunes folder, etc. All have been copied off to another drive.

But another disk, “E”, also directory, index, partition all wiped. 500 gigs of data still there, not overwritten. Trying out various recovery tools now – Recuva, Find & Mount, TestDisk – could use recommendations for others? Too bad there is no Windows equivalent of DiskWarrior for the Mac – that would have recovered the 500 gigs in about 5 minutes. Recuva says it needs 8 hours (and no guarantee that it’s gonna work). And if it does work, do I have enough spare disks lying around to hold that 500 gig? Not sure.

Right now I can’t even think of everything that was sitting on the E drive. I think most of it falls under “nice to have” rather than essential and maybe 50-75% of it is stuff I can get again but it will take time. (Luckily my photos are on F and my real MP3 library is on S,T,U – all RAID and all still okay.)

And of course I’m still gonna need to reinstall Windows and all apps.

I think when I reinstall, I’ll no longer use RAID for the C drive. Disk I/O was a noticeable slowdown with that set-up and since it’s not as idiot-proof (or Spike-proof) as I’d hoped, I’ll try something different. I’ll use disk imaging software like Macrium Reflect and back-up a disk image to a separate physical device weekly.

(And my own personal failure, a series of errors last night that screwed up 2 hard disks badly. Spent all night recovering data from one. Now need to see if 2nd can be recovered. Then need to reinstall Windows and all apps. Imagine my mood today.)

From Sunday’s SCMP:

#1 Great public hospitals: “A new mother mistakenly put her baby into another baby’s cot at the Prince of Wales Hospital and a nurse gave her baby a dose of antibiotics meant for the second baby. The nurse did not follow the standard procedure of checking the baby’s wrist tag before giving the injection.”

#2 The impossibility of staging cultural events that might have international appeal and bring in tourist dollars but wouldn’t appeal to locals: “Three days before Hesham Therwat was to throw his dream bash on Lantau Island, he was contacted by police. Mr Therwat was told that his application for a temporary liquor licence for a large-scale Full Moon Beach Party had been denied. During talks with the police, he learned it was because of safety, drug and noise concerns. Mr Therwat, 38, was baffled. He had hired security and technical professionals to oversee the event. He also thought he had the support of two other agencies, the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department and the Fire Services Department.” ““The Hong Kong government is not supportive in any way, shape or form,” he said, noting the difficulty of obtaining liquor or public entertainment licences and the worries with noise pollution, drug use and other safety issues.

#3 “Celebrity” tutors earn up to HK$1 million per month. Parents give their kids the money and let them choose which afterschool tutor to use and the kids choose based on advertisements and image. It’s good that there’s a focus on learning and good grades but this massively competitive, image-based industry strikes me as a Hong Kong anomaly and just wrong. And parents give up any responsibility in raising their kids other than just handing them money? “Schools use a web of incentives including star performances, free gifts and gift-redemption points that have children pressing their parents to send them to tutors who have become as much of a status symbol as a designer handbag, and just as expensive.” “Some tutors in their twenties claim they have been executives of multinational companies … only kids would have trusted them.” “The money that can be earned by a star tutor was illustrated by a recent court case involving Karson Oten Fan Karno, popularly known as K Oten, who was ordered to pay HK$8.8 million in damages for breaching his contract with King’s Glory Education. The court heard he had earned an entitlement to a HK$2.65 million share of its profits in just six and a half weeks in the spring of 2006. “

Reading the SCMP almost always convinces me that either our government is incompetent or that because most officials are not elected, they don’t give a crap about actually doing anything besides collecting a pay check.

Today’s case in point, another bus tragedy – these seem to be coming almost weekly now. A bus filled with airport staff on their way home hit a concrete divider on the North Lantau highway, flipped over and 3 people are dead, 24 injured. Prior to the accident, reportedly passengers were complaining to the driver about his driving – did the driver fall asleep?

All we hear about in relation to fixing things like this is the installation of speed limiters and seat belts on buses. What about stringent enforcement of traffic regulations? Cops out on the roads, radar and cameras, tough financial penalties that would put the fear of speeding (if not god) into drivers, 3 strikes and you lose your license?

The SCMP article also mentions that in 2004, there was a new law requiring all public light buses to be equipped with seat belts. All NEW buses. No need to go back and retrofit the old ones? Apparently there’s no point because they’re death traps anyway. “It would be difficult if the government required us to retrofit seat belts in the old models, because some of them were not designed to withstand the impact,” says a spokesman from the “Public Omnibus Operators Association.” Where is the “Public Omnibus Riders Association?” If these old buses are unsafe, why not get them off the roads? Well, that could cut into profits, which are more important than lives apparently.

“They are manufactured in different years, their technical specifications also differed, so we can’t treat them the same.” So? Is it that difficult a technical issue to figure out how to put seat belts into a 1987 bus and then how to put them into a 1992 bus? Wow.

Also the city has 6,000 “non-franchised” buses and the only ones of those required to have seat belts are the 1,000 that are on cross border routes. Who decided this? Why?

Last September, a mini-bus that was speeding along Castle Peak Road hit and killed a cyclist. We’re told that even though the cyclist was clearly visible, the driver neither slowed down nor made any attempt to increase the distance between the cyclist and the bus. The driver was just sentenced to 18 months in jail (even though the maximum sentence is 10 years) and loss of his license for two years.

So where is our legislature in all of this? With weekly fatal crashes and presumably some sort of public outcry, what steps are they taking? There’s no mention in the article.

The real issue in my mind is that, if I’m not mistaken, mini-bus drivers aren’t paid a flat salary, it’s based on a percentage of fares. So they are motivated to drive faster, motivated to drive for longer hours and the system results in constant accidents. Why doesn’t someone in LegCo, why doesn’t Donald Tsang stand up and say, “maximum X hours per day, a break of X minutes every X hours, flat pay scale, oh and let’s have stringent safety standards for all public conveyances.” Because that would cut into profits.

Oh, btw, today, frequent Letter-To-The-Editor contributor Paul Surtees is back in the letters column again, with a letter they’ve titled, “Public transport second to none.” Second to none at what? Killing people?

Oh and let’s hear it again for our public hospitals. A nurse at the North District Hospital took a vial of what she thought was saline solution but was really morphine and injected it into a cancer patient, who subsequently died. Actually, it’s not clear that this was the cause of death but even so, details on how this happened are frightening. “The nurse put down the bottle without labelling it and about 25 minutes later another nurse went to attend the patient and injected the morphine as saline solution.”

Last year at the same hospital, another “labeling error” was responsible for a woman having her breast removed. Because the staff mixed up specimen jars from two different patients.

On August 8th, two babies born the same day at Queen Elizabeth Hospital were swapped and given to the wrong mothers. And just last Sunday, infants at this hospital were injected with an expired vaccine. Actually, as the SCMP puts it, “ a nurse at the same hospital injected five newborns with expired an vaccine for protection against tuberculosis.” Because in Hong Kong, nurses don’t need to check the labels and editors don’t need to proof copy.

Or maybe I’m just in another bad mood today.

As some of you may recall, my mother is 88 years old. She’s always been a voracious reader and has always had problems with her eyes.

Back in the 60s, she was one of the first successful cornea transplant recipients. For all I know she might have been the first. I recall that her doctor dragged her around to medical conventions for awhile and she said doctors would line up to look at her eye and say, “That’s a beautiful eye!” and she’d say, “What about the rest of me?”

Anyway, for the past couple of years she’s been suffering from macular degeneration. There’s no cure but she’s been getting these experimental treatments – super expensive drugs shot into her eye on a monthly basis and for the most part they’re working.

But now she says she’s getting to the point where reading is starting to be a problem.

So I started thinking about the Amazon Kindle, from the perspective that they say it has six adjustable font sizes. According to them, anything you get on the Kindle – books, newspapers, magazines – can be adjusted so that they’re “large print.” So books – check. New York Times – check (“but will not include some images and tables. Also, some features such as the crossword puzzle, box scores and classifieds”). New Yorker Magazine – check (though no other mags that would be of interest to her).

Since I have no hands-on experience with the Kindle and don’t know anyone who owns one, I have no way to check this out personally. Can anyone out there comment on this?

As to whether or not she can figure out how to use one, that’s another story. She’s got a PC, does email every day and is even on Facebook. But she never even attempts to read instruction manuals. And of course not only am I not there to walk her through it, since I don’t have one, trying to walk her through it via the phone would be an uphill battle. I was thinking, she gets one, tries it out, worst comes to worst she can’t figure out how to use it, I buy it from her. Anyone else out there have a relative of similar age who’s using something like this?

The friend I met for coffee today happens to be married to singer Teresa Carpio and is her manager. (Her Wikipedia entry states that she lives in Canada – but not so.) She’s just recorded and released her first English language CD in years and is quite happy with the results.

When he handed me the CD he said he knew this wasn’t my kind of music so if I didn’t like it, I didn’t have to write about it. I put it on tonight and he’s right in that I don’t normally go for this kind of lighter pop music. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate an album that’s well sung, well played and well recorded and this album certainly is all of that. And while I’m no fan of the Carpenters, Teresa’s version of Rainy Days and Mondays, the opening track, has the kind of vocal phrasing that keeps the melody line intact but shows that she thought about how to sing this, how to make this version hers, how to add just a little unique touch here and there. So if you’re a fan of this kind of pop or songs like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Lionel Richie’s Hello and so on, you could do a lot worse than to pick this up. It’s even available in the US via iTunes!

The album was produced by Michael Thompson, who also played most of the instruments. If you look at the discography on his web site, the list of people he’s played with in the past 20 years just goes on and on – Neil Diamond, Joe Cocker, Anita Baker, Madonna, Fleetwood Mac, Babyface, Toni Braxton, Luther Vandross, Whitney Houston, Stanley Clarke, Christina Aguilera, Linda Ronstadt, Ray Charles … he’s been there, done that.

And my gf only had to hear one song before she asked me to rip the CD and put it on her iPhone. So there you go.

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Also tonight watched the new Blu-Ray edition of Gladiator. It’s one of two new releases in Paramount’s new “Sapphire Series” – the other being Braveheart. After reading the comparison review on DVDBeaver, I had to get both of these. And man oh man are they right when they say that “this is an incredible digital achievement.” The video quality can “make some swoon” and the audio “is ABSOLUTELY perfect.”

These guys at DVDBeaver are no push-overs – they do these in-depth comparisons between all available versions of a film, complete with screen captures from each version. This is the web site I check before I buy almost any Blu-Ray.

And the video quality of Gladiator is every bit as stunning as the review claims. So richly detailed, the clarity and the color simply amazing. This is the kind of disc you buy a Blu-Ray player for.

You can watch the theatrical cut or the extended cut and choose to watch them branching into 43 separate mini-docs on various points of interest. Or put in the 2nd disc (which I haven’t yet) which includes a 3 hour 15 minute making of documentary plus a 25 minute HBO special, an hour long Learning Channel special, a half hour “evening with” Russell Crowe, a 20 minute doc on Hans Zimmer, additional featurettes covering storyboards, costumes, production design, a 23 minute doc on the special effects … the list just goes on and on.

Paramount has actually “out-Criterioned” Criterion here. Of course in the end it all depends on whether or not you care for the film but I like Ridley Scott when he’s in his “big” mode.

Oh, here’s their comparison review on Braveheart if you’re curious.

Most years I try to be out of HK as much as possible in August. This year – no more business trips and I don’t want to take too much vacation time as that will hit the amount of severance pay I get, which means I’ve been home for the entire month.

So doesn’t it just figure that the SCMP reports today that this has been Hong Kong’s hottest August since 1974? Based on the number of days the temperature has been 33 degrees or higher.

I have a friend who says he actually enjoys this weather. The phrase “mad dogs and Englishmen” comes to mind.

Last night stopped into Rockschool for a bit. Spoke with the owner, mentioned to the owner the comment here about the sound system there (and I noticed other folks holding their ears). I found it loud, but not painfully loud. Anyway, he said he’s bringing in a consultant next week to help them sort it out, sound baffles, mixing, etc.

Today …. well, had an offer to meet a friend in town for a coffee. Sure, why not? I figured, Snow Leopard gets released today, can pick it up while I’m there. So I meet the friend and we had a nice chat.

But no Snow Leopard. Finally asked Leo at Hightech, who called Apple and they told him shipments to HK have been delayed, maybe next week Wednesday. I suppose that’s good in a way – I’ll have several days to read blog posts about installation issues and bugs before I attempt it myself.

And over to Rock Gallery, where he still doesn’t have the latest Radiohead reissues (Hail to the Thief, Kid A, Amnesiac). The first three reissues were examples of reissues done right (disc 1 the original album, disc 2 all B sides & EP tracks and some live stuff, disc 3 a DVD of all related videos) so I am anxiously awaiting the second batch of three that came out in the US on Tuesday. But he didn’t order US or UK ones because he’s waiting for HK ones (which are the same but much cheaper) only he has no news on when the release date will be. Sigh.

At that point, heat and all, all I could think of doing was going back home and settling into the air conditioning. Which is what I did.

Brief listens:

* Some reviewers are complaining about Willie Nelson’s latest album, American Classic, his first album of the “great American songbook” since Stardust. Stardust was stripped down and revolutionary for its time. This is lush and exquisitely produced. The fragility in his voice adds greater depth to the songs. If you haven’t bought (or downloaded) a Willie Nelson album since Stardust, buy this one.

* Arctic Monkeys 3rd album doesn’t move me much.

* Rumble Strips have paired up with producer of the moment Mark Ronson for Welcome to the Walk Alone, an album that sounds too much like Dexys’ first album to my ears.

I do like the new albums from Dead Weather and Cornershop quite a bit.

A short nap and now catching up on RSS stuff. In random order:

Ellie Greenwich, one of the great American songwriters, passed away at age 68. Songs she co-wrote include Leader of the Pack, Chapel of Love, Be My Baby, River Deep Mountain High and hundreds more.

In case you didn’t read this elsewhere, this season’s Curb Your Enthusiasm will feature the entire Seinfeld cast. One of the story arcs this season will be Larry David working on a Seinfeld reunion show. This is (hopefully) gonna be mega.

Eating Asia: This blog post on the Cholon market in Saigon is one of the best blog posts I have come across, period. Great information in the text. Fabulous photographs. Holding onto this one for the next trip to Vietnam.

Photocrati: A post titled, “I have Lightroom, do I need Photoshop?” which is a question I’ve been asking. This goes far deeper than just saying “layers, dude.”

Photocrati: A guide for submitting your photos to Alamy, one of the biggest stock photography houses.

Gizmodo: A guide to using Usenet, my first choice for downloading. This guy uses different software than I do and bases most of his instructions around NZB files, which I mostly ignore, but it’s a useful guide for the uninitiated; maybe useful for some of you if you haven’t already encountered this.

Asian Sweetheart: This photo. Need I say more?

There is a government plan to widen Hiram’s Highway, the road that stretches from Ho Chung to Sai Kung town. 99% of the time, traffic already flows freely along this road. So why is this needed? No one seems to be saying. One can only guess that an expanded roadway would lead to expanded real estate development, leading to the destruction of the essential character of the district.

Also I cannot imagine how extra lanes can be added to this existing road without massive environmental destruction. And given how it’s taken almost 2 years of massive traffic tie-ups just to add sound barriers to an existing road (Tseung Kwan O Road) and how long other local “improvement” projects have taken, this project would take years, would snarl traffic for miles, would increase pollution, etc.

Friends of Sai Kung has an online petition against this planned boondoggle. If you agree with me on this, please sign the petition online. Further details about the government plans can be found here, including an alternative proposal that makes a lot more sense to me.