Hi everyone.

I've been a member for quite a while now, but never posted a journal till now. Better late than never I guess!
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My Winter and Beyond was recently featured by here: [link]
So yeah, A big thank you to her. That piece now has like 8 times more views than any of my other art, not to mention a number of additional faves.
She has some neat stuff as well, so be sure to check out her gallery too!

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We recently moved from South Africa to Northern California. Prior to doing so, I purchased a Sabrent SATA/IDE to USB adapter hoping to be able to connect my internal 500Gb hard drive to the laptop which I am using until all our stuff finally arrives here. Much to my horror and disappointment, the drive started smoking the instant I connected the power adapter.
I ripped it out as fast as I could, but alas, it was too late.
Noticing only the control board on the drive had been burned, I purchased another identical drive hoping that by replacing my now-dead hard drive's control board with a fixed one, that it would work. Unfortunately, while the drive did power up, I could hear that the drive head wasn't working properly as it was making strange read sounds and would not show up on a PC.

I emailed Sabrent several times and sent the adapter back which they acknowledged as defective and replaced (As if I'm even going to risk trying the new one...), however they wouldn't do anything about my hard drive and its lost data in spite of the fact that they had NO disclaimers or warnings on the actual adapter, the packaging it came in or the single-page of poorly-translated instructions that came with it. They did however agree to send me a new Seagate Baracuda 500Gb hard drive, which I suppose is better than nothing. So yeah, now I'm sitting with one dead 500Gb hard drive with 450gb of inaccessible data, and two identical new 500Gb Seagate drives which I suppose I'll just set to run as RAID 1 once I have my PC again so that if one ever should fail, I'll have a mirrored backup. I've learned my lesson! ALWAYS keep a backup!

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Well, I now have to check for and remove a virus which seems to have shown up on my sister's USB drive again. (Namely IRCBOT, which tends to spread by means of removable media). If only the IT department at her school would lockdown and maintain their PCs properly. Good times...

Anyway, Have a great weekend everyone!