I'm just amazed that they can build an igloo big enough to fit even 40 students, but you are saying there are bigger colleges in the great, white north. Perhaps the school closing is because they are losing too many students to Polar Bear attacks. It's got to be tough fighting polar bears on your way to school.

Global warming, eh?


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On a more serious note, for those of us facing "parents getting old" difficulties... we're in the same boat, though those around at this point are doing okay. But we did lose my dad back in April and my step-dad in January 2013. Lung cancer, from smoking. Shouldn't be surprised.

Anyway, the lesson we learned was to talk this stuff out NOW, while the parent is in a condition to do so, and while they can make decisions and their wishes known. It's going to be uncomfortable at first. "Sooooo, you're getting old and will croak one of these days. Oh, no - you look fine NOW, but you never know, right? Haha!" If you have brothers and sisters, make sure they are directly involved from the start, just so there aren't any accusations of someone trying to become "the favorite" before the 'rents die.

Really, you're just trying to get this stuff out in the open so everyone knows what to expect, what's wanted for end-of-life care, the wishes for the funeral, and whatever other eventualities may arise. For instance, Mom says no assisted living or anything like that. Great - that's a big burden on us if she has a long-term debilitating illness, but that's what she wants for now. Maybe her feelings will change if / when it happens. What do you want should you go into a comatose state? What sort of revival / resuscitation measures should be taken, and under what circumstances?

Do you have stuff / items that should go to this or that person? For instance, Mom has earmarked certain family heirlooms for certain people, so there shouldn't be any confusion or gripes about what happens to some of the personal stuff.

Get the stuff in writing. Get people designated as the medical and financial decision-makers. Hospitals these days have paperwork for that, and some government bodies will have this stuff, as well. For instance, our local hospitals have paperwork to cover the medical side, and our state of Wisconsin has free forms for the financial / legal stuff.

If a parent has an illness with an inevitable outcome, such as our step-dad's lung cancer (dad's was too quick to do much about), take the time to get paperwork transferred over to the surviving parent while the ill parent is still able to take care of this stuff. For example, Mom had some difficulty with bills, car title and registration, etc., because both names were left on the accounts. So a lot of stuff had to be handled in person - with death certificate in hand - and that's just added stress and pain after the death.

To make things a bit easier in the event that Mom becomes debilitated, my brother and I have been made Signatories on her bank accounts. This means we can deposit and spend funds as needed without being financially tied to her accounts ourselves. You do NOT want to be made a co-owner of their accounts; as the mind starts to fail, who knows what crazy financial shit they might get themselves into without you knowing. If you're a co-owner of the account, you'll be on the hook for whatever it is they do.

One other thing that came from dealing with these things early: when the inevitable end came, in those last couple weeks, we didn't have to worry about a lot of these things and there were no arguments about how the final days were to be handled as far as pain management and the like.

My advice, then: do it now, while your parents can still talk about it with sound mind. It's painful at first, but then it turned into reflections on the past and talk of the future, and we got a lot of the worry about death out of the way so we could enjoy the remainder of life.

It's never easy, but it need not be overly difficult, either. Just make sure to get all of your brothers and sisters on-board and involved from the start.

I don't know anyone who walks to school... I mean we mostly all use our dog sleds... the dogs are pretty good at either outrunning or just killing the poler bears... but it's the moose that get us. Always be careful of the moose.

Moose seem too dopey and addicted to simple magic tricks to be dangerous. Perhaps it's those sneaky little flying squirrels that may be the true culprit.

I've bitched about this before, but god damn it I'm getting fed up with the unreliability of external USB hard drives, and the apparent stupidity(?) of current filesystems...

I have this old 500GB PATA hard drive from which I'd like to move the data to a new bigger 3TB hard drive. For this purpose I was going to use an USB HDD chassis (has connectors both for PATA and SATA HDDs). I copied the data (among them thousands of compressed .7z, .zip and .rar files), and for extra security I copied them using TeraCopy which is supposed to double-check the copied files that the integrity is still ok (I think it uses CRC32 for checking the integrity after each file copy).

After several hours the copying is finished, no errors reported by TeraCopy, the CRC verifications were ok as well. Yet, when I tested some of the compressed files, here and there some were corrupted. I checked the original files also on the source 500GB hard drive, and some reported corruption errors also there (maybe 5-10% of the files). So it appeared the files were corrupted on the source HDD already, nothing to be done?

I still decided to connect that PATA hard drive to my old desktop PC (which has old IDE ports and cables), and surprisingly there no errors are detected, all the compressed files appear fine when I run an integrity test to all of them with 7-zip. So it appears the culprit is that I was accessing the hard drive via USB, that caused corruption in both copying or merely accessing the files?

I tested my theory also with the dvdsig utility, ie. I first created a md5sum list of all those files, and then let dvdsig to verify that the files are still ok. Verification gave constant errors, as if the files had been corrupted while it merely scanned the files (but I presume it was simply because when it was verifying the files, it got wrong data over USB compared to when it created the md5sums).

Am I just unlucky, or do others have similar corruption problems when copying files over USB? If this is "normal" and expected, how on earth dare people to use USB hard drives for backup purposes? I have installed the latest USB drivers from Intel site just today, to make sure they are fine.

So the things that really tick me off:

- What good is TeraCopy when it felt the copying process was success, and I ended up with a bunch of corrupted files? Of course it could be TC got the same corrupted data both during copying and verification, in which case it would consider the copying fine.

- Is USB really that unreliable for data transfers? Could we have some _reliable_ method for external hard drives then, please? Too bad e-SATA isn't more widespread, I presume it should be more reliable as it is specifically designed for external hard drives.

- Regardless of all that, why are filesystems (without utilities like TeraCopy or dvdsig) so stupid that they don't automatically check the file integrity during file operations, making it extra sure that no corruption takes place during them. or at least reports that the copying process was unsuccessful? Or if they do, they don't seem to do very good job with it? NTFS, ext4 etc.?

I read about the newer filesystem <span class="bold">BTRFS</span> which is apparently meant to be the successor to current default Linux file systems (ext4), and among its features I recall being "checksums". Would that filesystem finally be one that actually cares about the integrity of the files so that they survive intact with file operations, no matter over what kind of connection you copy them? Too bad Windows will probably not support/use that filesystem...

<span class="bold">ZFS</span> appears to have the same goal, to fight data corruption.

I hate the latest fashion design for female and type of clothes they wear, people using "# tag",shacking there butt,people interesting/looking at butts & kids with high tech smart phones.

Tornado sirens! yay!

Tornado touched down near the center of "town" also known as where the one stoplight is located. Thankfully it tore through a bit of woods and fields and no one was hurt.

I've never had that problem, but I don't have many compressed files and I just use the standard Windows Copy. It could be the brand of your enclosure just has a crappy chipset. I read reviews of several USB enclosures last time I was shopping around and they had similar problems as you. It made me hesitant to buy one, and instead I ended up buying a Western Digital USB Drive....All my old IDE's are sitting in a drawer gathering dust.

You ever think about just hooking them both up internally and transferring files over IDE/SATA. Get a removable drive tray if you want to make it easy on yourself.

To me the problem is: how to know if nothing was corrupted, especially when working with non-compressed files (corruption on compressed files is revealed when you try to uncompress them, or run the compression utility test on them)? So in your case, how have you made sure afterwards that nothing was corrupted during the copy process? Or are you assuming so since there were no errors reported by the copy command?

Windows copy command doesn't seem to report any problems unless there is some serious issue (e.g. it can't read the source media at all). Then again, when copying from CD/CD-R discs, there apparently is some kind of check, as it may sometimes complain about the copying being unsuccessful due to a CRC mismatch?

It may also be that the USB cable is the culprit. It is a rather long one (maybe around 1.5 meters) on this PATA-USB enclosure, even though it originally came with one (I don't remember if it was this one, or some other enclosure). On my newer dual-SATA-enclosure (USB 3.0), the USB cable is much shorter, like 1/8 of the length.

Anyways, my main annoyance is that Windows (the filesystem) doesn't seem to detect these corruptions in any way during the file operations. Here's hoping for Btrfs and/or ZFS to become more commonplace... Until then I guess I need to try to rely on TeraCopy and dvdsig on Windows. And I would hope for some reliable replacement for external USB hard drives as well, e.g. eSATA. I am unsure if any of my laptops have eSATA ports.

Ps. Unlike I earlier said, on the IDE cable 7-zip reported some corruptions too, but in less files than when I checked it with the USB enclosure. Maybe I should try it a few times trying to see if I get different reports each time (ie. whether the list of corrupted files is different on each run).

I have dual backup drives, so I am not worried about it as much you. However, my backup program has a check built in at the end to check for corrupted files, and of the files I manually add I have probably run half of them.

Same here (for the files I don't want to lose at any point), e.g. the 3TB hard drive I mentioned, actually I bought two in order to keep two identical 3TB copies.

Too bad though that won't help me if some of the source files are already corrupted, and I am merely making backups of corrupted files from one USB hard drive to another. :)

Now that I remember it, last year I had a bit similar case when I had most of my GOG games archived to an external 2.5" USB HDD (LaCie). When I tried to install many of them, only then I realized some of them were corrupted (something like 5-10% of them, not all).

I am still not sure if they had always been corrupted since the initial download (I had used GOG Downloader client to get them, no errors reported by it), or if they had gotten corrupted if and when I had copied them around to that USB HDD. So it was a different enclosure that time, a pre-packaged external LaCie hard drive.

I'm just not trusting USB hard drives that much anymore...

worried sick about a law all people with a WA-Jong handicap benefit should be re-examined. The plans have been there for some two years now, the law gets in effect on 1-1-2015, but UWV takes it time till 2018 to examine all 100's of 1000's of cases. Years and years of worrying make me even more sick than I am.

Which programming language?

Some asshole on a travel web site just told a blatant lie about our establishment and I am powerless to do anything about it. I understand opinion is subjective and everyone is entitled to theirs; there are other negative reviews on the site that while I don't like them are true subjective opinions and thus warranted, but this is a flat out lie. Telling us we advertise one price and charge another is strait up malice.

I need to play some Postal to work this off! :P

I have seen some bigger chain hotels actually post comments after some negative opinions either apologizing for the slights or delicately calling someone a liar on travel sites. Perhaps you can just leave a review stating your opinion or apologies.