Still Kicking

Yes, we are alive. I am slightly embarrassed that I have not posted since Thanksgiving. :-) Oh well...

Anyway, things are going well around the farm. Winter has truly arrived. We've been getting a inch or two of snow every few days and it is starting to build up a bit. The temperature has also dropped. Last night the low was -1F. Brrr. With the below freezing temps at night, we keep our milking herd in the barn at night. We put bedding in their stalls for comfort and feed them indoors at night in exchange for using their body heat to keep the barn warm enough to prevent the water pipes from freezing. They still go outside during the day for exercise and for more food.

The past week I have been trying to prevent a massive file loss on my iPod. I have been using my 80GB iPod as a portable hard drive for a while now, to free up some space on our computer and to easy access to my freelance graphics files. Long story short, the iPod went corrupt from being disconnected improperly from the computer and it held about 17GB of my files hostage. To fix my iPod, I needed to reformat and restore through iTunes. But before I do that, I had to get my graphics files from it. I tried several extraction softwares, but I wasn't getting anywhere. Somehow on Friday night, my iPod allowed me to access the my files and I could start copying the files to my computer hard drive. I soon realized it would not be that easy. I had corrupt files scattered within my good ones and it would not allow me to copy all of them. So I had to make some hard decisions, saving ones I could and abandoning others. I ended up with about 2.5GB recovered and the rest either I could not recover or decided I could live without. Last night I pressed the reformat button and nuked my iPod... :-(

Moral of the story: Have a Backup operational for your computer files!