SAFRA-rk

Boy! do i hate idiotic services from government based recreation club. i had joined SAFRA which is a government based recreation club, thinking that i might need to use their facilities during then. Since i dont get to use the facilities that often or NEVER, reapplying seems to be out for me .So everytime when i received the application notices to renew the membership, i just trashed those notices.

Just when i was checking out what the hell was service pay to NSmen when they are doing their reservists. i have noticed that i was paying for something that shouldnt be there. Even though, it was not a lot of money involved but thinking that the money was what i have earned sweating my butt off during my reservist, really cheesed me off.

Guess what! that government based recreation club uses an unique method of getting the subscription payment for themselves. They are basically siphoning it off from NSmen pay either through their service pay, makeup pay, IPPT award or RT reimbursement.

As quoted from their terms and conditions:

” 2.  SAFRA will make deductions from a member’s pay with a Ministry/Statutory Board, or from the National Service Make-up Pay. The deduction will cover current and advance subscriptions.”

What the f***! Charging users when they are not aware of the subscription.  This reminds me of realplayer subscription.

Flickr woes

The photos i have uploaded to flickr seems to be less sharp than the original……….hmmmm.

Just when you think it wouldnt happen to you!

Just two weeks ago, i had lost my years of photos in a PC configuration running in RAID 0. I thought it would not happen to me as the PC as just recently setup about few months back with very new hardisks. But damn things do happen and when they do……. you would start to think why you didnt do this and that to prevent it! Lots of curses, swearing and finally some compromises made with my inner peace. What lost has been lost, can you do anything about it?

Anyway, since i am going to rant….. might as well tell you my misadverture story behind it. Here goes:

I was running two RAID 0 configuration; the older RAID 0 system (i shall name it RAID A) with older hdds was meant to use it for system and programs while the newer RAID 0 sytem (i shall name it RAID B) with the newer hdds was meant for data backup. So one fine day one of the hdds with RAID A decided to surrender its IC (IC aka Identification Card. in which dead people doesnt need them LOL!). No big deal for me as I can simply check which is functioning of the two and make it a temporary system drive.

But with my lack of experience of RAID system made a mess out of my RAID B as well. The system installs and boots fine in the undamaged older hdd (from RAID A). But once I placed the RAID B onto the equation, things started to get very cranky. It was found out that the computer can boot with a RAID A (system) and normal hdds (data) or RAID A and RAID B together but not normal hdd as system, RAID B as data. It got to do something about the limitation of the bios settings. I was having too many BSOD that i have decided to get a new “companion” hdd for my older hdd to run RAID A again as i need the data from my RAID B data drive.

It was only clear from then that my data from RAID B was screwed up pretty badly as one of the hdd had already disconnected from the array. I have asked qns on the forum but no smart arse was able to answer my qns on the reconnecting the hdd back to an array. Nearly lost all signs of hope, till i managed to search a thread on similar problem……… the solution was simply to delete and create the array. So i just try lah, bad mistake!!!! i didnt managed to see it as a drive in the computer management but thankfully i didnt initialised (another bloody phase used by M$ for formatting) it as well.

Managed to saw someone who had some luck in getting a software to work for him in retrieving the lost data from a RAID system…… Hey why not!

One thing for sure is that the bloody software rocks!!!

http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizardpro/

Having paid about $SGD150 (USD89.95) for the software that manages to retrieve my years of photos…. all i can say is that it is damn worth it! Just dont overwrite any info or format the drive and you should be relative safe in securing those images.