Crash and die

Last night my external hard drive accidentally fell on the ground and smashed something on the inside because it is no longer recognized by the computer & it makes a clicking noise which my brother in law says is the kiss of death.
Everything was on there, photos, documents, music, digital pages I'd been working on for my scrapbook. All the photos older than 2yrs are on cd as well, but none of the recent stuff was. Thank goodness for facebook, at least some things are on there, but a lot of it wasn't, I'm so gutted. Also last week my sister took my hard drive & was loading stuff onto her hard drive for about an hour. I emailed a couple of data recovery places, but their fees were around $5-800, which, for a hard drive that only cost $100, seems rather exorbitant. But i guess its the memories which are important. I don't know if i want to pay that much just to retrieve photos though. I have learnt my lesson though - always back stuff up, and never trust Maxtor USB hard drives, they can't be made very well if they break that easily.

Weather Cancellations

I planned a trip to Dunedin this week, I had booked both my accomodation & my flights. Unfortunately just as I was getting organized to pack, the weather packed in down there (snow & blustery gales). I was a bit worried about getting stranded down there as I only had four days off work, so on sunday I cancelled my accomodation. Sunday night I'd already decided it wasn't worth it to go down & my trip would have to be postponed til another time. Monday 5:30am one of my workmates rung me to tell me that my second flight (down to Dunedin) had been cancelled, the airport was closed due to snow and ice on the tarmac, which is fair enough from their point of view. So its a good thing I already had decided that I wasn't going down. I still want to go another time, just maybe when its summer & theres less chance of a cancelled flight.