Urbana09

I wanted to tell you all about this awesome missions conference called Urbana. I have gone twice (2003 and 2006). The conference happens once every 3 years. It is called Urbana because it used to be held at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Some 40,000 people come together for the conference. I absolutely love it. It is put on by Intervarsity Christian Fellowship which is a college campus ministry (similar to Campus Crusade for Christ). The conference is in St. Louis from December 27 to 31.


Here is the full schedule. There are morning Bible studies that really help you learn how to study the Bible inductively on your own. There are group sessions where you learn to sing songs (mostly written for Urbana) in several different languages (Spanish, French, Korean). There is an exhibit hall where you can meet hundreds of mission agencies and learn about what they do. There are dozens of "classes" for you to check out each afternoon on any topic you can imagine dealing with missions and ministry. Also in the big auditorium you will hear these amazing speakers. One of the best parts is that you sing until midnight on New Year's Eve and celebrate by dedicating the new year to God with 40,000 international brothers and sisters in Christ. It makes me think that's what heaven will be like - praising God in all different languages with so many people from every nation, tribe, and tongue.

If you get a chance to go, I highly highly recommend it. Check out the website! Feel free to pass this on if you think others may be interested!

Harddrive Heartache

Getting re-acclimated to the US after being in Ukraine / Germany for 2 weeks has been tough... really tough. For lots of reasons. Besides the post-mission trip letdown that you normally would experience, I have been having a ridiculous amount of IT problems... expensive IT problems.

First, my iPod was lost in Ukraine. If I replace it with a new one that is capable of holding all my 35GB of music (I'd need the 120GB classic iPod), that will be $250. Haven't spent that yet... It's definitely not a necessity.

Then, when I got home, I had successfully transferred 2058 pictures (all from the 13-day Ukraine / Germany trip) from my camera's SD card to my external harddrive. I started uploading the pics to my Picasa site. You can only upload 500 pics per album. I got one album up and I was nearly 300 pics into my second album when my external harddrive crashed. My computer will not recognize the drive. Now the sad (and stupid) thing is that all my pics from 2005 through today are in jeopardy. My laptop's harddrive is small, so I bought the 350GB external harddrive for $99 in Feb 2007. The docs and music that are on the external HD are copies of what is on the laptop, so that's fine. But the pics and vids and 6GB of overflow music (techno songs that are long so they are too big for my laptop) are not replaceable.

So the recovery effort begins.

I gave my SD card to my friend and coworker who was able to successfully recover 95% of the Ukraine pics straight from the card! (I had deleted them after copying them to my HD.) He burned those onto DVD for me, so now I can go through those pictures and start putting them online to share with you!

Then on Friday I took my external HD to a computer store in League City. They work remotely with a lab in Denver. The store manager told me that if they could retrieve the data in-house, it would be no more than $130. But if not, they would hook it up remotely to the Denver-based lab and it would be at least $500.

Yesterday, Denver called me to say that they could see my folders and files. That was the sign that the shop couldn't do it in-house.

Today the Denver lab told me it would be $625 to recover the data. It doesn't matter if I retrieve some or all... that's just how much it's going to cost. There are 96GB of data on there.

In addition, I had to buy a new external HD for them to put the recovered data onto. That was another $250. I bought one with 1TB (1000GB) of RAID 1 mirrored data and auto backup software to prevent this from happening again.

Once my new external HD comes in, I can take it to the computer shop and then the Denver lab will remotely download all the recovered data to it. For a mere $625, I can once again have my precious pictures. ;)

I'm kinda debating if I really want those pictures and files... But, there are 20,629 irreplaceable pictures on that harddrive. I guess it's worth it... it's just hard when you have to pay for a preventable mistake.

This has been an expensive summer:
$600 replace stolen camera earlier this year (preventable)
$625 recover lost data (preventable)
$250 replace lost iPod (preventable)
$250 replace ruined harddrive (preventable)

Am I careless? Not really, just had some bad luck lately. At least I have a job...

Great Bike Ride!

I went for a terrific 20 mile bike ride on Saturday. Check out the map!

Yuri's Night

To all my faithful readers:

Just a quick YN update. We are still having the Fun Run and the Celebration at the Meridian from 8p to 1am. However, the Space Fest Education Day is going to be rescheduled. Stay tuned for more info about that. As part of that, the Art Contest will also be rescheduled.

Thanks for checking my blog!
Please go here for more Yuri's Night info (and link to purchase tix): http://yurisnighthouston.net/