I’ve been cleaning out my website.  Creating new galleries and deleting files and folders and came across my family tree.  Or several family trees.

Years ago I started doing some research with my cousin, Darlene and her father, who I’ve never met.  Frank actually emailed me some photos of his family and I showed my parents and my mum then pulled out copies of the same photos!  Proof positive.

I got the trial version of ancestry.com (and .co.uk) and started reasearch.  I managed to track my direct drawbridge line back to 1742!  Which is pretty good going.  Before that, I can’t find anything.   I did find another Drawbridge line going pretty much that far back, but I’m unable to link the two.   I’ve found Drawbridges on Facebook from both lines, and I’m sure we’re all one family.

I wanted to share the tree I created on familyecho.  I have 285 people listed.  I had to guess a lot and I’m sure there’s a lot wrong.  If we’re related and you see an error, or want to be added, let me know and I’ll put you in.

You can get to the tree HERE

I bought my computer nearly 8 years ago. Which as far as computers go is a thousand years. Since then I have upgraded the hard drive (twice), power supply, RAM, graphics card, all the fans. But it doesn’t disguise that it’s still a 800 year old processor sitting on a motherboard that dinosaurs would have laughed at.

I was sitting watching it render a not uncomplex image the other day and decided it’s time for an upgrade. It was at this point that my “computer”, reading my mind, decided to have an existence failure. How did it know what I was thinking? Oh, it still works, after a reboot. But I can tell it’s in a bad mood since I have to coax it to do anything more complicated than add two single digit numbers together. Even then I have to check the result against my phone.

I started looking around. Upgrading to a nice quad-core. How nice would that be? Apparently, Victorians had Quad core computers. Not sure what I was thinking. Even my phone has a quad-core. It seems that eight cores is the way forward these days.

I don’t play many games.  Tomb Raider is the only one I really enjoy.  But I have to turn the settings right down and even then, towards the end, I’m getting maybe 3fps.   It’s just not possible to finish.   It seems that Gamers have the right idea.  Gaming PCs have more computing power than some governments.  That seems to be the way forward.

I’m saving my pennies and I’m looking at an AMD FX 8 core processor, 8GB RAM and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX graphics card. I might actually end up with a better computer than Heidy. Besides being able to render god ray caustics in Carrara in less than a few days, I might actually be able to finish Tomb Raider.

Fingernails are great.  Why did no one tell me this? I’ve bitten my nails since I’ve had them.  I can’t remember not biting them and I bite them bad, right down until they bleed and then some more and if I can’t bite the nail I bite the cuticle and if I can’t do that I bite the skin.   As soon as I can get the tiniest bit of nail between my teeth, I rip them off.   I’ve wanted to stop, but not enough to ever actually do something about it.

A few weeks ago I notice that one of my nails was “long” and by long I mean not a bleeding stump on the end of my finger.  I don’t know how this one slipped through my fingers (pun totally intended)   The cuticle was not bleeding and, although raged, I liked the look.   It was then I decided to my a concerted effort to not bite my nails.  After just a few days I could actually feel them growing.

It’s hard to explain, but I was very aware of nails growing out of the end of my fingers.  I could almost hear the creak of growth and had to fight to not nibble on them.   After a few more days I could see white growing on the end.   This was unheard of.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen white growing from my nails.  40+ years of abuse had made them weak and the ends were ragged and broken, but I fought the urge to bite them clean off.   My sister, in her failed attempt to get me to stop, had bought me a nail set.  I dug it out from the cupboard it had been hiding in and pulled out the file and actually filed a nail!

It’s now at least two weeks and although I have caught myself with a nail between my teeth, I haven’t bitten one off.   I’m finding them very useful.   No longer do I have to scratch an itch with whatever is laying around and I actually picked up a coin from the floor.  And as for removing labels from old books, it’s now a hobby of mine rather than a source of frustration.    It’s an odd feeling.  My fingers actually feel longer.  I am aware of my nails scraping along things and reaching places before my fingers.  Not to mention the psychological aspects, I used to think I bit my nails because I was a nervous person, but now I feel calmer and confident and think that biting my nails was the cause of my nerves.

I wish I’d had the forethought to photograph my nails when they were bad.   To a non biter, these probably look nothing special, but to me, they are amazing.

To my fellow biters, I can’t give you any advice.  I really don’t know what has stopped me biting other than will power.  I would suggest you try one day with a real effort to not bite.  If you can go a day, go two then a week then two.  Beyond that I don’t know since I’m not there.

begin rant

Drobo is a great idea.  On paper.   It’s a small simple  RAID (redundant array of independent disks) solution for information storage.   Gale won one in a competition a few years back.     It has multiple hard drives that mirror each other.  So as you put files on one drive, they are copied to the other.   This has the HUGE benefit that if one drive should fail, then you just pop out the bad drive, insert a new one and keep working without any loss.  The downside is, as we have found out multiple times now, is that if the Drobo itself fails then you have lost both drives.

Which means that Gale now has two 1terabyte hard drives with information we can’t access.    Obviously the warranty has expired and the replacement power supply (which I suspect is the problem) is $60.   I’m unsure what to do next.  Luckily, kinda, this is the second time it has failed, so she had copies of pretty much all the important stuff.    Oh, and the other thing, the drives are formatted in such a way that only a Drobo can read them, so I can’t just plug it into a computer and copy everything over.

/rant

Update: They just emailed me back. Which was very quick. The tech thinks i’m right. He suggested things I already tried and then suggest I buy the out of warranty plan for the replacement. $269 please…