Archive for October, 2007
Happy Halloween from Slysoft
October 21st, 2007 | 
Author: Slysoft (makers of AnyDVD and CloneDVD) are offering a big discount for Halloween. Save 20% off any product.
As a special promotion for Halloween we offer a 20% discount on all products (except upgrades). To redeem the coupon just enter the
- coupon code: halloween
in the box ‘Coupon / Promotion Code’ at the bottom of the check-out form. Please note that this coupon is only valid until November, 5th 2007!
Posted in 
Porsche Club Project
My Porsche Club magazine cover is coming along quite well. The first part has been done. I took quite a few pictures of downtown Charlotte from just at dusk until night – about a 2 hour span.
Now that we have the background it’s time to get the foreground shot. Of course the centerpiece for a Porsche magazine would have to be a Porsche. So we took a Porsche 993 and took it to the top of a parking garage to take some pictures.
It was a really nice day with a beautiful clear blue sky and warm temps. It was a simple matter of parking the car and the taking shots from various angles to see what we liked. I started off with the camera on the tripod just above bumper level and taking some shots. The main goal was to capture the lines of the car and to give a somewhat exaggerated sense of size. That’s pretty easy, just use a short lens and move in.
I wanted to capture from the front bumper to the middle of the door. There are plenty of shots of the whole car, but it’s mainly side angles not just a flat shot of the side of the car.
I also took the camera off the tripod and lay on the ground to take some shots. I like the angle looking up, it makes the car loom and seem even bigger.
I think the shots came out very well and I’ve already got ideas on how to use many of the shots for other projects.
You can view the full gallery of images here:
http://www.8×10gallery.com/photo_gallery/harvey_porsche/index.html
Porsche 993 provided by Harvey Yancey of the Porsche Club of America – Carolinas Region.
Just in the nick of time?
I have copied all my photos to the new 500GB drive and during that process found out there at 5 bad blocks on the original 250GB drive.
I had problems copying the files originally using just the copy/paste method of Windows, so I went with a backup program that might actually have some intelligence built into on how to handle slow/problem files. The copy went fine except for 6 files.
As I tried to copy those files manually it became clear something was wrong. The system would hang every time I tried to use them. Even from a command prompt I couldn’t copy them.
I ran chkdsk several times, each run getting rid of a few errors and bad entries. I finally managed to get the files copied across and then ran a scan of the entire drive to make sure. There are a couple of blocks that give I/O errors so the drive might be going bad or it could be these are just bad sectors and once Windows knows about them it will be fine.
Either way, looks like I might have gotten the new drive just in time. Now I get to do the whole process over again and copy all the files to the other backup drive.
By the way, these MyBook drives are pretty impressive. They can easily be powered down when the system goes into Standby and when the machine wakes up, so do they.
I don’t know if there is a fan in the case or not, but they are more than just an enclosure. They are no where near as hot as the other drive enclosures I’ve worked with before. You can still pick this one up after its been running for awhile.