I had some extremely bad luck today. I just bought a 42″ Westinghouse LCD HDTV a few days ago, and I was quite impressed by it. On the way home from work I picked up a copy of Total Recall on Blu-ray, so I would have something new to watch on it. As soon as I got home, I put the the disc in and got ready to relax. As the movie started I noticed a horizontal bar of dead pixels going across the screen. Yesterday I watched a bunch of movies on the screen and the line wasn’t on there. At first I thought it must be a problem with the movie. After trying a few different devices that were connected to the TV, I realized the television was defective. So I lugged the huge TV back to the store and returned it. They didn’t have any in stock so they had to put one on order. I should have my replacement by the eleventh of the month (which is this coming Saturday). So in other words I have to suffer through the rest of the week without the new television.

Since I didn’t have my new screen to watch movies on, I decided to do some work on my music pack. The music pack has been done for a while, there are just a few things I have left to do before I can start selling it. The first thing I needed to do was create some promotional artwork. So I started working on it and everything was going great. Suddenly the screen went black, and the computer wouldn’t turn back on. I also noticed that the light on the power supply wasn’t lit like it normally is when its plugged in. In other words the notebook was dead. I am guessing the power module went, which is most likely part of the motherboard. It’s a MacBook so it would cost a lot of money to fix it. I guess I could sell the parts on eBay or something like that.

So now I am in the process of recovering the data from the MacBook’s hard drive. I have a MacBook Pro that I use for music recording, so I figured I could just throw the hard drive in it, and recover the data. Only if it was that easy. In order to get to the MacBook Pro’s hard drive you have to take apart the entire notebook. I spent a little more than an hour getting the thing apart. The screws in the MacBook Pro are tiny, and almost impossible to remove. And then just to taunt you, Apple put two Torx screws in the MacBook Pro, that you need to remove in order to get the hard drive out. Naturally I didn’t have a Torx bit for my screwdriver, so I just used a bit of brute force with a tiny philips head screwdriver.

Once I got the thing open it was pretty easy from there. I just plopped in the hard drive I wanted to recover, booted up the machine and started backing up the files I need to an external hard drive. I was a bit amazed that Windows Vista didn’t have any sort of activation issues. I was really worried I would boot the notebook up, and it wouldn’t let me get into the the system. Fortunately Microsoft didn’t decided to make this bad day even worse.

Yeah, today was just one of those days…

I have been planning on reworking my website into a blog format, and finally I got around to doing it. I added a bit of new content like a few YouTube videos, and migrated all the existing stuff on my website into WordPress. I am going to be posting on my blog frequently, so check back every so often (or add my site to your RSS reader). It’s so much easier to manage things now that I have redesigned the site…once again.

Speaking of new stuff, I will soon have a web based store up and running. The first product that’s going to be up there is my new music pack. The pack has actually been done for a while, but I needed a way to sell it. The music pack should be released in the next couple of weeks, after the store is ready to go.

And once again if you find anything interesting or helpful on my site, remember it’s completely ad supported. So if you see any ads on the right side of the screen for products that you find even the slightest bit interesting, give them a click. I get paid for Google ads based on how many users click on the ads, not how many users view them.