Joey, my parents dog, is now down an eye. He had some sort of blockage that caused the normal pressure in one of the eyes to leap something like 4 times normal, causing a slipped lens (or perhaps due to it). We noticed it when I was taking care of things while my parents went out and I destroyed their computer. All we knew was that he would squint with that eye occasionally, and were hoping it wasn’t going to be an issue. But the area became swelled with infection, and even began affecting the other eye. My mother spent a week at the vet’s where essentially she was told the eye would have to come out. If it didn’t then, it would probably eventually, he was already blind in that eye due to the damage already done. Then she was told that during the operation, there was a 1 in 4000 chance they’d damage the nerves such that he would be completely blind. And that was only if he survived the operation at all since he’d have to go under general anethetic, which always carries risks.
In the end though, as of Friday last week, he was done, sans an eye, still with vision in the other one, and home again, though wearing a lampshade around his neck for two weeks. He still needs to have the other eye monitored, but for the moment it seems the worst is over. He’ll probably bump into things for a while, but he was doing that anyway even with two good eyes.
Joey in 2007.
In other news, I lost an external drive this weekend, I seem to have bad luck with hardware now. I had a 320GB drive that was kind of flaky ever since I got it. I was hoping it would work better on Vista (perhaps with a better driver) but windows would still report disk errors with it in the event log, and lose sight of the drive contents until it was power-cycled (the drive, not the computer). Anyway, I bought a 1TB drive and copied all the stuff over from the flaky drive. I was originally planning to just format it, but I decided to run the windows version of Disk Doctor, having it scan for bad sectors and all. It was taking a long time, so I left it to run overnight. I got up the next day to find that the window was already closed, so I had no idea what the results would have been. I checked the contents of the drive, but it didn’t see anything, so I power cycled it, and it still didn’t have anything. On further inspection, it said the file system was RAW. So trying to fix the drive utterly destroyed it, oh well, I copied the stuff off, so I’ll just format it. Trying that just has a dialog pop up immediately saying the format failed. I’m not sure what else to do, but since it has a history of acting up, I’ll just retire it outright.
It was my Strange drive. I named my volumes (and wrote in ink on the enclosure) for quarks. I didn’t really plan to have many drives, so I thought 6 names would be enough. I currently have Top (1TB), Bottom (500GB), Up (250GB at work right now), Down (250 GB), Charm (500GB), and Strange (320GB and dead). These are all connected to the Vista machine via a USB hub. They sit on a shelving unit next to my desk that I got for expressely for these drives. Alicia was over and saw them for the first time and was shocked at all the storage, heh. I also have an unnamed drive that isn’t connected up that I used to backup my internal drives on the old XP box. The backups were done ad-hoc and quite old, it’s basically emergency backup to have something. I need to figure out a proper backup strategy.
So these past few months have been pretty unpleasant. Computers dying, cameras breaking, and even the family dog going under the knife. Hopefully the fullness of spring will bring nicer things.
Updated: nicer things failed to be brought, as Joey’s other eye went soon after and had to be removed. He’s now blind, but seems to be coping okay.
