Well, not that lazy. Jeff and I rolled out of bed at the crack of 9:30 or so to pack up snacks and head to the beach – El Matador (in Malibu) with Michelle and Diana (both from IPAC). Michelle has frequently mentioned El Matador as her favorite beach, but I had never been there before. It’s a great place – several sandy coves seperated by rocky promontories, which are cut through by caves that you can wander through. On the hike down, we could see dolphins and sea lions playing in the kelp beds just offshore.

The surf was a bit high to do much swimming, but we did wander down and check out the sea caves. The tide had only been going out for a couple of hours, so it was still too high to risk dragging my camera along. Too bad; I’ll definitely have to go back sometime at low tide, because the caves were pretty cool. You have to scramble through one small one to make it to the second beach (which is often used by nude sunbathers during the week). The second one’s a bit easier to get through, and opens up into a large cavern. Depending on the time of year, it’s also a good place to spot anemones and starfish, a lot like nearby Leo Carillo.

No sea-cave photos, but I did snap this silly one of Michelle attacking a peach:

Tonight, my mom took a bunch of my friends out to dinner at my favorite lunch spot, South Lake Italian Kitchen (SLIK). The owner Donna is the main reason I keep coming back to this place; she’s spectacularly sociable and just a lot of fun to hang around with. We met up with Jeff, Ben, Kathy, A2, Michelle and Marianne, and posed for this rather unattractive picture of the lot of us:

Afterwards, Mom, Jeff and I dropped by Michelle’s house for drinks and animal watching. Tonight – in addition to her two adorable cats – we also spotted many orb spiders spinning webs, and one skunk who came up to the stairs to see if the cat food was accessible. Combined with yesterday’s raccoon sightings, I’m feeling like quite the wilderness girl this week.

Walking back from dinner at Far Niente tonight (thanks, Mom!), Jeff and I were distracted at the corner of Kenwood and California by the sound of something scrambling up a tree. Drawing a little closer, we could see it was a pretty sizeable racoon just a few feet up the trunk, frozen in its climb to watch us. We stood still for a while, and after looking at us for a few moments it continued on up the tree.

Then I noticed another little racoon face peeking out of the storm drain near the tree – but as soon as she spotted us, she dashed back into the drain (we were clearly visible in the light from a street lamp). After a few more such false starts, we walked on past the tree and stood still in the shadows until she felt brave enough to leave the storm drain. She paused next to the curb and called up to the one already in the tree – kind of a cross between a bird’s trill and a purr. Actually, it really reminded me of the noise made by the little venom-spitting dinosaur that kills Dennis Nedry in Jurassic Park. But cuter. He called back down to her, and she made her way up the tree to join him.

Very cute.

Last Tuesday, I visited my server (it lives in a friend’s office) to remove a DVD writer from it. The idea was to install that DVD burner at home, so I could start backing up all my photos; since I don’t normally have physical access to my server, I handle its backups over the network. Before heading up to perform the server surgery, I backed up my web site and gallery, something I’d been meaning to do for a while (I did not, however, back up the system disk, which houses Sarah’s website and the database).

DVD drive removal went fine. But when I hit the power button again, I got the dreaded error message:

BOOT DRIVE FAILURE

Hmm. Ben and I were both rather stumped, since the drives had both been working just fine 30 seconds ago. We tried again, with the same result. We tried switching the drives – no luck. We tried hooking them up one at a time to Ben’s computer, but it couldn’t see EITHER of them. Now I was really starting to panic; what were the odds that both of my hard drives died at once?

I took them home that night and continued trying to revive them. Linux rescue mode was no good (it claimed it couldn’t find any linux partitions on either disk), and I couldn’t bring either of them up on another computer, either.

After a while, the drive that houses my website (let’s call it “Fred”) started making a really terrible noise when it started up – kind of a “TICK-tock-TICK-tock-PING,” over and over until it gave out. Ok, I told myself, Fred’s clearly dead – but surely drive #2 (we’ll call it “Bob”) couldn’t also be completely ruined.

I set Fred aside and continued to attempt to rescue Bob. I had Bob set up as a slave on the primary IDE controller, with a perfectly good boot disk as the master. I hit the power button, heard a loud POP – and Bob began to smoke!

Being the calm, collected person that I am, I immediately jumped back about 5 feet and yelled for Jeff, who simply yanked the power cord out of the back of the server.

So, that was it – everything was lost – except, thankfully, for my website/gallery which I’d just backed up that morning! Jeff made a late-night Fry’s run for a new hard drive while I prepared to re-install the system and restore as much as possible from earlier backups (the last one was in January) and Netscape caches. I spent the rest of the week rebuilding thelaitys.com, and finally got it hooked back up in Ben’s office this afternoon.

Bob’s innards:

 

Makes a pretty good mirror:

Bob was actually rather an old drive, which had passed through several hands (and computers) before landing in my server. Our best guess is that Bob had been overheating for a while now, and damaged something crucial – and since it was sitting right on top of Fred, the heat may have gotten to Fred too. I guess they were both just barely hanging in there, and the power-down/power-up finished them off. As to what finally made Bob CATCH FIRE, I have absolutely no idea – but the new drive has been running just fine in there without incident, so I think I’m willing to believe that the root of the problem was the drive, and not the power supply in the server. (If I’m wrong, I hope Ben’s office has good smoke detectors!)

It’s going to take a little while before everything is back to normal; I need to re-enter all my dive logs, and Sarah has a lot of restoration to do for alphasarah.com. But GOOD GRIEF, have I learned my lesson about backups! (And about the wisdom of just backing up from one drive to another, as I often do on my home PC, since surely BOTH drives would never fail at the same time…)