August 7, 2008 Archives

I have an external drive I bought a few months ago for backups. I haven't used it. There were problems partitioning it. Maxtor ships these formatted for Macs and it's the consumer's job to correct that!

Tonight I finally figured out what was wrong (I think) and began the format process. I'm going to bed now, but the job will continue.

Do you have any idea how long it takes to format a 500 Gb drive? I didn't.

With all my digital pictures and the new Canon Xsi using nearly 20 Mb for each RAW/JPG image, I really need this now.

Now that the drive is partitioned and formatted, I'm backing-up through the USB port. It's just photos to begin with, but it's mind boggling. This PC (one of three with photo collections) has 28,117 pictures and videos to archive.

From time-to-time the process seems to stop. It's possible I've hit a video file there, some of which are multiple gigabytes long!

I know this is 'good for me' but it's a pain-in-the-ass. The big question is, once I've done this will I have the guts to move these files off the computer?

I got to work this afternoon as thunderstorms were firing. No surprise there. They had been well forecast by me (and everyone I would hope). As the afternoon progressed the storms increased in intensity until, just before 6:00 PM, we went to a Tornado Warning for Fairfield and New Haven Counties.

It might be different in the Midwest, but here we go wall-to-wall with Tornado Warnings and so we dropped what was scheduled for our newscast and began to do live weather.

When you start live coverage, you have no idea how long it will last--I certainly didn't. Ten minutes in, Gil Simmons (our morning meteorologist) came in. He wasn't dressed for TV, but he strapped on a mic and helped out off-camera. I can't begin to tell you how helpful he was.

By the time we rejoined regular programming, I'd been on-the-air live for a little over an hour straight. It was all ad lib for me... and everyone else. You've got to remember, the producers, director and crew were trying to make sure we were all heading in the same direction, though we really couldn't speak directly to each other. They were amazing--probably more than they realize.

I don't think there were any tornadoes this afternoon. I'd rather have it work out that way. But while it was happening, who could tell?