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What. A. Week!

OK... I have a confession to make - I have been a bit slow on the whole blogging thing. I said I'd blog more and starting from now I shall! I have had this blog partially written for a couple of weeks now and it is about time I got it finished and made way for new ones!! So really this blog is about another week a few weeks ago not the one just gone...

Well... That was quite a week. I think the term I should use would be "a roller coaster of emotions"! There have definitely been ups and downs for sure but also some lessons along the way. So, lets start at the beginning:

On Monday 17th August the weather forecast was set to be good so a couple of mates and myself went down to Manor Farm Country Park and took a load of photos. We didn't have a purpose for these photos, just wanted to get some good ones of the sunset and anything else that may be interesting down there. If you want to know more about the actual photos and the techniques that were used, especially in the night photography shots, then head over to this blog post (which I'll be writing soon and adding the link in soon after ). The really elating part of this was getting home and downloading, sorting and editing the photos. Where the photos had no specific purpose the edits could be done to however I wanted which was wonderfully fun as it turns out. This was definitely an up on the rollercoaster of my week!

The photos are now on my Flickr stream here.

Continue after the break if you want to see more about my week, including the drama of results and the dreaded crashing hard drive!

That is the begining of the week over and done with. The next big thing to happen this week was exam results. This was a big thing because it was basically my future in a little brown envelope! I had gained offers from all of my university applications and chosen 2 from them. My primary choice - Southampton Uni to study Computer Science which needed AAA grades - and my insurance choice - Portsmouth Uni to study Digital Forensics which needed 260 UCAS points and 2 A-levels minimum.

Well the long and short of it is that I got AABB for my results. OK I admit I was gutted when I found out I couldn't go to Southampton however now I have realised that Portsmouth may be even better than I first thought as I will be studying a course which fewer people are doing over the country and as a result the competition for jobs will be easier and the topic seems really good too! Also I am already programming so maybe specialising is what I need to do.

So it is off to Portsmouth University September 20th I go! Expect to see more Digital Forensics related posts on here in the future!

And finally the big hard drive disaster which started off good and became very bad very very quickly! After downloading all of the photos from earlier I soon realised that I needed more space and I had been thinking of getting a new hard drive for my MacBook Pro for a while now so I decided that I would purchase a 500GB 7200RPM hard drive for my Mac. I ordered it from eBuyer as they had it for a good price and I have never had any problems with them. The hard drive arrived nice and quick and I set about taking my MBP apart (using a YouTube video as a rough guide on what to do: Upgrading the Hard Drive MBP 15" (Mid '09)). This was all going fine until it got to the part where I needed to remove the 4 Torx screws which hold the HDD in the shock absorbers. This meant a trip to my local RS Components store to get one as ScrewFix and PC World both didn't have any. Anyway I finally got the HDD installed and everything backed up from my TimeMachine on my Ubuntu Server.

Everything was fine for 2 days... Then everything froze. Oh apart from the mouse oddly enough. A forced shutdown was required (First time ever for my Mac too!). Upon turning it back on I got nothing. Absolutely Nothing.

This was not good. I resisted the urge to run and scream and instead proceeded to trying to boot from the Mac OS X install CD... Err no that didn't work either. I couldn't boot to anything at all. After phoning Apple and them helping me go through everything I had already done again and coming up with a few extra ideas I hadn't come up with but to no avail. I finally gave in and put the old HDD back in and voila! it worked again. Fortunately.

So a phone call to eBuyer later and it is swapped over for a new one. This one is installed with no random trips to get a new Torx bit as I had already changed HDD twice so far (for any of you who are keeping count). Then it came to backing up from Time Machine. Well getting the new drive had taken a while and so I had completed some work on my old HDD that I didn't want to lose so I decided to backup to Time Machine again. Unfortunately I needed to wipe Time Machine and start again. No big loss. 5 hours later it was ready to restore to the new HDD - Yay!

Start Mac. Boot from CD. Mount Ubuntu Server. Start restore from Time Machine. Wait 2 hours for it to get to 95% and FAIL! This happened a total of 3 times before I gave in and bought a new 1TB external HDD (Western Digital My Book Studio) and used SuperDuper! to backup to that. For those that are indeed counting the number of times I have now taken apart and swapped HDD's it was 2 times per failed restore plus once more after buying the new drive. This gives a grand total of 9 times I took apart and swapped my HDD. Not sure if that makes me an expert but I'm now pretty sure I could do it with my eyes shut and hands tied behind my back

Anyway everything is now in working order and I'm going to get on with some work and write another blog post later this week hopefully!!