Bradley J. Shively

Data Loss

// February 8th, 2009 // View Comments // personal

My 1TB Seagate hard drive has been acting up lately, and I assumed it was on its last legs. Coincidentally, I had just begun burning most of the data on the drive to DVD and erasing it to make room for other content.

It started with my torrent application, µTorrent, giving me periodic “The device is not connected.” errors.  The only way I was able to resolve these was by rebooting my system.  I also noticed that the drive would make an audible pinging sound when these errors started cropping up.

I largely disregarded these warning signs, and continued with my copying processes.  I also continued to watch video I had stored on the drive.  To be quite honest, I didn’t much care if I lost some of the data on the drive as nearly all of it could be easily replaced.

This morning, the drive took its last breath.  Rebooting the machine took an extremely long time, as the drive struggled to initialize.  It then showed up only as “Local Disc” in My Computer, with size and free space readings both of 0 bytes.  I migrated the drive to an eSata enclosure, but had similar results.

When I attempted to run chkdsk on the drive, that seemed to deal the final blow.  Multiple data recovery programs were unable to even detect, let alone scan, the drive.  Lastly, two linux live CDs failed to boot with the drive connected.

Fortunately for me, the drive still has a large balance of warranty remaining on it.  I have opted for Seagates advanced exchange program, which for $19.99 gets me a replacement drive up front via 2-day shipping as well as covers my return shipping.  Since I figured I would spend close to $10 just to ship the drive one way, and I have had RMA procedures take upwards of 3 weeks in the past, this was the best option.

I should note, I really like Seagates products.  They have excellent warranties (5 years on some drives) and I have rarely had problems with them.  I have had many more drive crashes from Western Digital, Hitachi, and others.  Also, the drive died after only about a year of use, but since it served as my primary bittorrent hub, I was literally reading from and writing to the drive almost 24 hours a day.

All told, I probably lost about 600GB of data of various types.  Most of it can be easily replaced, albeit it is a bit of a hassle.  I’m very fortunate that of all my drives, this is the one that crashed.  The others could have cost me a great deal more both in terms of time and pain associated with data loss.  Once my replacement drive arrives, I will most likely reevaulate my backup strategy (as well as the frequency at which I archive data and remove it from my active storage).

A Jumpstart On Keeping This Promise

// February 4th, 2009 // View Comments // personal

The Only Thing I Love More Than Twitter…

// February 4th, 2009 // View Comments // personal

Apparently, is IST2U. Well, and the word “using” but I’m sure that is used (ha!) in a multifunctional context.

This, of course, isn’t true at all. There is a lot to my life. I love music and movies. I’ve been plowing through business books, and my new Nike+ & iPod touch combo should help me get through audiobooks on my list even more quickly. I enjoy spending time with friends, and I even do some school work occasionally. However, I tend to focus on a few core topics on this site. The past few months have been all about the process of migrating IST2U to Wordpress, and the changes that have been made to it.
While the results have been great thus far (I’m sure I’ll write a summary post within a few weeks; once the waters have settled a bit more), I’m starting to feel as though I come off as one dimensional.  I want to break into other topic areas and touch on subjects other than just the professional projects I work on.  Perhaps in a month or so, I’ll regenerate my Wordle, and see how it has changed.  Hopefully by then I will have met my goal of talking about something other than my job.

Thanks to Wordle for the cool tool, and thanks to Cole Camplese for the inspiration, which I stole from here.

A Critical Look at IST2U

// January 14th, 2009 // View Comments // Penn State, design, news

Among my many responsibilities at the College of Information Sciences and Technology, I am the Media Director of IST2U.  In a nutshell, this means I’m the guy that gets e-mails about upcoming events from all the folks in the offices at IST, which I then condense into short blurbs that contain the essential information (date, time, location, a sentence or two summarizing the event.)  The purpose of IST2U is to be the official source of information about events and opportunities happening within the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State.

In my previous semester as the media director, I focused primarily on keeping the wheels spinning.  The transition from the previous director was a tad bumpy (due to no one’s fault in particular, just the nature of the beast), and so my main efforts were spent meeting folks around the office and processing updates as they came in.  However, towards the middle of the semester I began to get a bit more experimental.  First, I added Google Analytics tracking into the Drupal installation that runs the site.  With the help of one of the IST system administrators, the analytics results exclude any traffic from inside the IST Building (since many of the workstations there have IST2U as their homepage).  This greatly reduced the number of “false hits.”

I also setup a Twitter account for IST2U.  This was my first stab at “real” marketing for the site.  While I have given brief talks at student government meetings, in classes, and so on, I had never really actively “pushed” IST2U to people.  By integrating IST2U with the Twitter social network, I took the first steps towards giving students the opportunity to select from a variety of content delivery mechanisms.  My predecessors used e-mail campaigns, essentially carpet bombing all-student mailing lists with a weekly digest of news and events.  However, students often begrudged this approach and would create spam filters, or simply delete the messages without reading them.

The best thing about the Twitter account for IST2U (for me) is that it is fully automated.  Using the TwitterFeed service, the RSS of the page is checked every half hour and updates are automatically posted to the Twitter account.  This is a great payoff, as it takes only a few minutes to configure, and after that you can just let it do it’s thing.  My ideal marketing solution is the passive “trickling” of data to different outputs, from which the userbase can choose their preferred method of content retrieval.  This will leave me free to compose new posts, analyze traffic and advertising results and develop new campaigns based on these results, and improve the site by adding new features.

I believe that RSS is highly underutilized within the college demographic.  I know very few people that use any sort of RSS reader, and even fewer that are “up to date” on the articles they subscribe to.  Therefore, having the website and an RSS feed as the only mechanisms for content delivery is, in my opinion, a terrible strategy.  For this reason, I am trying to extend IST2U into more social networks that I know are utilized by college students.

Tonight I setup a Facebook “Page” for IST2U.  On it, I have created a discussion board where students can post feedback, feature requests, etc. that I will evaluate and hopefully implement during the re-launch of IST2U.  My goal is to have IST2U fully migrated to WordPress (I find it to be considerably less “clunky” than Drupal) by Monday, January 26th.  It is my hope that through these improvements and renovations, IST2U can finally become what it was always intended to be: a useful, viable web resource for IST and SRA students.

I am currently in the process of drafting a traffic report, in which I’m conducting an analysis of the data I currently have on IST2U, as gathered by Google Analytics over the past several months.  This will be the baseline upon which we compare the success or failure of IST2U in the future.

A Quick Word

// January 11th, 2009 // View Comments // news, personal

I haven’t posted any news here for some time, so I thought I’d post a brief update.

Classes start tomorrow.  I’m extremely excited for IST 402: eMarketing / The Google Online Marketing Challenge.  I hope to learn a lot about using AdWords and online marketing in general in the class.

My holiday break was enjoyable, but uneventful.  I did get some reading done, including the excellent Managing Humans, which everyone should check out.

I’ve started a small personal project to teach myself jQuery and improve my PHP skills.  The beginnings of it can be found here.

Silence On the Wire

// October 28th, 2008 // View Comments // Penn State, gtd, personal

I’ve kind of abandoned this page [with the exception of my tweets in the side bar] since setting it up.

Suffice to say, there are a lot of things going on.  I don’t want to go into too much detail right now, but here’s a quick overview:

• The Magazine of IST (MIST) has launched it’s new site (using Wordpress) and will be releasing its Fall 2008 issue soon
• I am in the process of organizing a team for a startup, to be launched in Summer/Fall ‘09
• I have, of course, been attending to my various duties at school (classes, papers, homework, programs etc.)

Big updates will be coming soon.  I have a few articles in ‘draft’ stages, and I’ve also got some posts coming out in the Fall issue of MIST.  Check back for more soon.

Getting Things Done, Making the Switch, and Interface Invention

// September 10th, 2008 // View Comments // design, gtd, mac

In my ongoing approach to find better ways to “get things done“, I’ve been using CulturedCode’s Things.

Even though I’ve only just recently “switched” to Mac OS X, I’ve already found that my years of Windows shortcut-keying are starting to be replaced by the Apple accessibility shortcuts. I also don’t know how I ever lived without multitouch gestures. With the MultiClutch Preference Pane, I’ve programmed Firefox and a few other applications so that I can easily navigate them with a few simple gestures.

Coincidentally, my switching to OS X and the release of Firefox Ubiquity occurred at almost exactly the same time. I’m not only adjusting to using the Quicksilver ‘launcher’ (and so much more), but now I have Ubiquity for web surfing and all the built-in interface tweaks that are a part of OS X. I’m completely dependent upon Spaces.

I think it’s interesting how the interface (menu bars, startbar, etc.) has become so much more flexible. I can now navigate to sites without using an address bar, open programs without browsing a start menu or directory, and perform countless other tasks through automation and macros. The GUI included with Windows and Mac OS seems to be increasingly less important as developers come up with unique ways for users to index and search the resources on their computers without using the out-of-the-box utilities.