Hard Drive Update

/

Trying desperately to get back to normal... I borrowed the old Toshiba I gave to my Mom a few months ago and have been using that to work on stuff during the day. Most files are on the server, but there are quite a few e-mails and files attached to e-mails that I need to get off the old HD. The recovery folks are working on it, and it's going to cost over $1,000 to retrieve all the data and back it up on DVD-R.

Went to CompUSA today and got a 60GB Western Digital drive. But the DVD drive on the newer Toshiba doesn't work, so I can't boot to CD. Here's the plan:

I put the new drive into the old Toshiba and booted to CD. I'm running Windows setup on the old Toshiba and copying over only a minimum of drivers, etc. once I get the drive partitioned and formatted. Once that's done, I'll swap the drive into the other computer and see if I can install software remotely from a shared CD-ROM drive on the network. This is going to be a giant pain in the ass, if it works at all.

I'm supposed to get the backup DVDs from recovery tomorrow. Then I get to copy all of that stuff over the network. Joy!

The April Fool's Joke That Wasn't

/

Came in this morning to find my laptop continually trying to boot from the network. This was odd, but I thought somebody might be trying to pull an April Fool's prank on me. So I checked out the BIOS and found out that the machine wasn't recognizing the hard drive. I shut the machine down and pulled the drive - didn't seem overheated or anything like that. So I put it back in.

Rebooted the machine and heard this godawful noise ("GRRRRRRRRNT!"). Yep, the hard drive went on April Fool's Day.

And, of course, there's some recent e-mail and files that weren't backed up to the server yet. So I went over to a recovery place this morning. They're promising to call me back by 3 PM with a status update.

Meanwhile, I'm working here at the office on a spare machine, getting my e-mail through a pain-in-the-ass web interface and trying to remember what exactly I needed to do today at 2PM. (I think I had an appointment scheduled, but I'm not sure.)

Technology sucks.

Cookie Crumbling Discussions Percolating

/

The main driver bringing the cookie-blocking issue to the forefront of the online marketing industry's agenda seems to be the Jupiter report that shows nearly 40% of web users clearing cookies at least once a month. Chatter is definitely up on this issue, and a lot of online marketers are having their "Oh, Shit!" moment, once they hear from their colleagues about how sound the Jupiter research is. Lots of people seem to want to know how their affiliate commissions are being affected. They also want to know about how ad server metrics are being affected and how site measurements regarding unique users may be inflated.

Meanwhile, MarketingVox covered a story about a possible cookie substitute based on Flash. While this would make sense as more advertisers move to Flash-based rich media ads, I'm skeptical about whether it would work in the long-term. Wouldn't consumers resort to blocking Flash or removing the specific component that allows for this kind of tracking? It seems that whatever technologists come up with to solve the problem is susceptible to the whims of the folks who develop anti-spyware tools.