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IRAF is a four letter word »

Work was a great thing today. Another student working on a parallel project to mine, Jason Looper, was around today completing some tasks with me today. There's a brand new laser printer the Dr. Leake bought to print out PostScript files from a UNIX machine for asteroid tracking charts. Unfortunately Jason nor I had any experience setting up printers on UNIX boxes. Frusterated by our lack of knowledge we got in contact with a VSU network technician. Keith is a student who really knows his networking stuff. He happily exited his stuffy network command center to visit our problem in the outside world. He knew exactly what needed to be done and also had some time to fix my VSU account. Suddenly he gave a slightly underscored "Uh-oh" and mumbled something about to the effect that he may have crashed VSU's server GRITS. He excused himself and strolled out of the room and broke into a dead sprint when he hit the hallway. Jasona and I laughed it up because he was such a laid back guy until a large problem lingered overhead. We were amused at his dramatic exit.

After lunch, Jason and I occupied computers in a GIS lab to print out charts with the locations of asteroids for our observations at Kitt Peak, AZ. Each with 4 computers crunching away at the Lowell server, we printed out volumes of the charts. It was a pretty impressive piece of multi-tasking if you ask me.

My troubles with the ol' computer continue today. I wrangled with the idea that since the problem with my hard drive isn't physical I could find some software or company that does data recovery. Upon calling a couple places I learned that data recovery companies focus their techniques on business and corporate clients. This was apparent when one place I called quoted me a minimum price of $750 that could quickly raise to $3000! My heart nearly stopped and I politely informed the that I was a college student and couldn't come close to affording those prices. After I loosened my colar a bit to aid airflow to my lungs, I found a place that has a piece of data recovery software called Tiramisu. At a minimum the program costs $50 but can only recover five files at a time. A $200 version will recover as many files at once as desired. As this is by far the cheapest means with which I may recover my precious photos and animation projects, I have a decision to make.