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Thursday, 7 August 2014

My data is recovered --- but my pergola is tooo! high

Having tried everything to “revive” my presumed dead external drive I was getting resigned to losing 5 years worth of pics.  The biggest disappointment being the loss of the holiday pics from Hong Kong, Australia and Fiji in 2011. 

I viewed the parcel with the replacement disk enclosure which arrived yesterday with a jaundiced eye & fingers crossed as I unwrapped it.  I was fully expecting the old disk to be a goner.  I didn’t even bother fitting the disk in the new enclosure I just plugged it into the printed circuit board then hooked it up to my Ubuntu machine. 

The clunks, clicks and lack of the noise of spinning platters sounded very ominous.  Realising I had the drive upside down I turned it up the right way and viola! it groaned its way back to life immediately displaying the various folders on my Ubuntu machines screen!!! 
Well at least the PC can see it I thought and gingerly moved the mouse to “copy” the pictures folder and pasted into the Ubuntu O.S.  
It racked up that there were 56101 pics to paste and that it would take 45 minutes to complete the operation.  I’m sure we have all seen these copy operations terminated in Windows because of some broken protocol rule where it will roll back the whole operation before finishing it.  Ubuntu seems able to cope with the odd problem but I still sat there watching it throughout the whole procedure.

Result! Every single pic copied and now safe on the Ubuntu machine! Also promising myself to complete my DVD copy back up of the pictures folder.   I quickly copied a few other things from the ailing drive as I noticed a bloke outside our back door.    

“I’ve come about your pergola and fences” he informed me.  Wandering up the garden with him and me wearing my “confused expression” he explained that “someone” had expressed concern at the height of my fences and pergola’s!

Still flushed with the success of recovering the pics I was rather well disposed towards him and it paid off in the end.  We had a general discussion about planning rules, it turns out he was from the local planning department. 
To cut a longish story short it turns out I need to lower one half of my northern pergola (the bit in front of the shed) more or less to the level of the near half and shave a bit off some of the fenceline up the path on the left of the garden.

“You’ll need to get planning permission for that” he said pointing at my neighbours
Incredibly high fence, “I hope not” I replied, it isn’t mine.  Another discussion followed after which I left the bloke taking photographs of the fence, and returned to my data copying.   

A little while later the bloke bade us farewell indicating we would get the options open to us in a letter.  We had already decided to lower the offending bit of pergola and the job will be expedited without delay.

The fate of the fence that friends have described as “The Berlin wall?” the bloke wouldn’t discuss it but it looks as if it will be worth watching developments over the next few weeks - - -

Off to work this morning as a balloon passed overhead 
Its quite high in this shot but by the time I reached the shop the balloon I could see it descending about half way between the shop and our cottage. 

Down at the Fun Factory my boss, “lets call him Craig” has been doing the night shift managers job for a couple of shifts,  I blogged about him being off sick not long ago.  Once again he was rather philosophical about it but certainly “not amused!”        


I had wondered about buying a replacement external disk drive and a “bargain” at the Fun Factory caught my eye.  A 1 Terrabite 2.5 inch drive was on display for £42 (after staff discount) it’s not normally something we stock and there were I was told only 3 in the shop so I snapped one up! - - - 

Enjoy the day
Follow this link to see  our weather website
Or this one just to see  the streaming birdfeeder cam


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