I did what you wanted today, Mom. I love you and miss you always. It’s up to Dad now. Thy will be done…

forever your loving Son,
Vincent

Recently one of my online friends sent me a memory card from her camera in the hopes I might be able to recover her vacation photos. Something went screwy wackadoodles BOOM awry and all of the pics on the card weren’t there anymore. I offered to see what mojo I could dojo and with nothing to lose she put it in the mail.

[SKIP THIS PART IF TECHNOLOGY CONFUSES YOU]

See, I had done a lot of data recovery over the years on bad hard drives, CDs, DVDs, memory cards, flash/thumb drives, old pianos, circus midgets and the occasional dark elf so I was pretty confident I’d be able to recover all her images off the whacked-out/corrupted SD card.

The minute I received the card I tried it on all my computers and while they knew there was a memory card inserted, they could not read or see anything on it.

Which is a bad thing because it meant the card was severely corrupted and inaccessible to the computers. So no amount of software I had in my data recovery arsenal would probably work. What to do?

[KEEP ON SKIPPING NOTHING TO SEE HERE EXCEPT A PRETTY GRAPHIC I WORKED VERY HARD ON]

[OK THE CONFUSING PART’S OVER]

Still not stumped but a tad intrigued, I put my digital camera on PLAY MODE, with her corrupted card inside it and an amazing thing happened. The little green thinking light went crazy and after a few seconds an image appeared. IT WAS ONE OF HER LOST PICTURES! My digital camera was able to see the card and slowly started resurrecting her wiped, corrupted pics! My camera worked on this problem for about ten minutes and after it was done all of her pictures were there - all 217 of them. Fully freaking restored?! TA-DAAAA!

Who knew? I never saw that one before but hey, I go with anything that works. I quickly connected the camera to the computer and copied over all the restored pictures and thus, with the help of my trusty Canon Powershot A580 digital camera/new data recovery tool, my title of Miracle Worker was still in place.

My camera saved the day, I took credit for it, somewhere where it’s cold all the time a nice lady with six children got some of her precious memories back and the world is a better place, indeed. Boo-ya!

This Christmas was very, very good to me. I got assorted wunnerful gifties: clothes, moola, a small food processor (home-made salsa baby!) and the best thing you can ever get a geek - shiny, new glad-I-didn’t-have-to-shell-out-for-it-tech, complete w/that new gadget smell: A Motorola Droid X smart phone!

Anyone who knows me understands how practical I am, even though I am a die-hard übergeek. I love the shiny-new toys but unless I have a reason for it, I almost never buy it just because it’s shiny or cool, that’s for pretend ubergeeks or those people they put up those ridiculous impulse aisles in supermarkets. I buy shinies when they’re reasonably priced, suit a purpose I need them for and are well-worth the dough I have to shell out.

My previous cell phone was a nice Samsung Trance. It wasn’t a smartphone, it made calls (sadly not the most important feature in a phone for a ton of morons out there), played music had a camera and fit in the the coin pocket of my jeans. It was small, tiny even, super thin and had more than enough features to make me happy. Oh, and no stupid flip the phone open to answer a call (I HATE THAT!), all you had to do was slide it open. To end a call *gasp* you slid it shut. Loved it!

But alas, Mr. Trance was immediately shoved in a drawer somewhere the minute I opened up that nicely wrapped box to discover I had now been gifted a Droid X this Christmas. (I don’t even know where I shoved the Trance, poor thing.)

To say I love my X is an understatement. I haven’t been this shocked since a very special birthday when my sistas gave me an iPod. This X is my first smartphone and X-tremely special just like my iPod.

I’ve always loved the Droid X since it came out and after showing it to my brother when he was in need of a new phone, he got one. My love of the phone (and the Android platform) was known to everyone I know, but still, I wasn’t really looking for one yet because my old phone fit my needs just fine and I was waiting for a good deal on it or the next better alternative later on when the time came.

Well, it came early on December 25th!

I immediately did a lot of reading and investigating to trick out and hack my phone. It wasn’t an hour old when I started downloading free apps and tricking the sucker out to customize it and expand it’s functionality, as any true ubergeek will do.

I take my Droid X everywhere I go and if I forget it for a second in the house I go and get it. While I wouldn’t call it immediate separation anxiety, if it’s not on my person or right beside me, I have to find it. It’s legal to marry a smartphone, right? If not it should be! Who’s with me?!

Droid. It’s what most people use. We are many. We are Droid.

This will be my last post of the year. What to say? Should I say something serious? Wacky? Full blown Nutzo? Schizophrenic? Totally lame or insane?

Nah, I’ll just comment high praise on the Seamonkey browser’s spell check knowing how to properly spell schizophrenic. Kudos, Seamonkey spell-check. Kudos.

The end.

Welcome home, 2011. Welcome home.

This Tuesday I boarded a plane all by myself to visit a beyond beyond beyond great friend of mine. And when that fell through I visited my other brother from a different mother (didn’t want to waste all that dough). It was the first time I’ve ever traveled on an airplane alone and I felt like getting a Big Kids meal at Burger King to celebrate this momentous occasion. That is until I saw that somehow at airports, the price of a Big Kids meal is the same as a Lamborghini (the 2010 LP670-4 SV model of course). Yeesh, and I thought the oil and credit card companies were out of hand; someone should really do something about those airport gypsies! Although come to think of it, their prices are 25% lower than movie theater concession stands…

Anywhoo, thanks to American Airlines for providing me with a great deal, $227 for round-trip nonstop flights to Texas and back I booked my trip and informed my lucky host I was coming over for a few weeks. Surprisingly he didn’t leg it and was very happy I was traveling over 1,100 miles at 34,000 feet to stay for a few weeks. What can I say, all my friends are ing .

I usually don’t have any problems packing but life at the ole homestead was unusually hectic with minor and major disasters (not to me, the Universe as always luvs me) so instead of having 36 hours or so to pack and organize everything, I had about 27 minutes or so, give or take 27 minutes.

I had a lot to do and no time to do it. I needed to pack, I had to buy new sneakers, clean up a few hard drives and then there was my laptop to configure.

This would be my laptop’s first trip on a plane (first trip anywhere actually) and it was real excited to be loaded with a lot more software than usual. Since this was it’s first trip it was a little nervous but my iPod Nano told it all about it’s trip a few years back and lappy calmed down. Before I left I accidentally made sure that my laptop case was chock full of enough cables, wires and electronic doo-dads to look like a tick-tick-tick-BOOM thingy on X-ray. The case was bulging at the seams with all kinds of tech, it’s a wonder it didn’t explode! I still can’t believe when they scanned it no one tackled and body searched me.

Because something in my wallet is impervious to being scanned (it’s gotta be my Jersey Mike’s card, I just know it), I got to go through one of those body scanners you hear about that enable people to see your junk and make late-night Showtime flicks with. I think the person at the other end liked what they saw because they asked me to jump up and down and do a few pelvic thrusts to help “calibrate the machine.”

I even got a phone number. I wonder if it was from a man or woman.

In passing, one of the things I didn’t like was kicking off my brand new shoes that took hours to find that fit my feet perfectly. And when I took my belt off too, as I was looking around I couldn’t help but think thank The Maker that there was never an underwear bomber. Although there were a few ladies in line I’d love to see if there was, the view would have been spoiled by the other 257 hairy and plump Quasimodos aka “average Americans.” *shudder*

That’s it for now peeps, next time I’ll post some travel tips and highlights. Smell ya later…