Panic!

...Our second (older, from long before my time there) server died. It's a 733MHz Pentium III-based Compaq ProLiant ML330 running Windows 2000 Server. My boss informed me that there was no backup, which was bad because that server apparently handled all of our financial data (taxes, payroll, donations). We don't exactly have the equipment to handle that particular kind of failure ready in the building, so they almost sent me home with the hard drives (since I do happen to have the necessary equipment ready there). While it was tempting to go home and take the rest of the day (and potentially all night) doing work that they really don't pay me enough for, I went to the bathroom instead... Upon my return, I went through a six-hour process involving screwdrivers, ancient SCSI drivers on floppy disks, Windows password hacking, various hard drive recovery techniques (ended up getting things workable with "chkdsk /r" in the recovery console), convoluted network data transfers, and a hell of a lot of dust bunnies; my boss was shitting bricks the whole time. In the end, I recovered everything and decommissioned the old server. The data is now on a RAID 1 array and is currently being backed-up to a separate physical drive; tomorrow, I will make an archival copy on tape. The funny thing is that I'd been bugging them to let me do that months ago.

Anyway, I bought a SEGA CD game lot through craigslist on Sunday. I really only wanted Panic!, but the seller wouldn't break up the lot... So, for $50, I got Cobra Command (looks cool, but gameplay's annoying), Dragon's Lair (looks bad, gameplay's annoying), Heart Of The Alien (looks like its predecessor, but the gameplay's way more annoying), NBA Jam (CD music is great, but just about everything else is straight from the Genesis version), Panic! (love it!), Racing Aces (this may just be the worst game I've ever played), Silpheed (great twist on the shoot-'em-up genre), Sol-Feace (another sweet shoot-'em-up), Sonic CD (already had it), Space Ace (looks and plays much better than Dragon's Lair), and Wing Commander (it's Wing Commander), all complete and in great condition except for Cobra Command (just the CD) and Panic! (some damage to the manual). I'll be keeping Heart Of The Alien, Panic!, Silpheed, and Sol-Feace; giving Sonic CD to a friend; and trading the rest toward... Something else? I dunno, we'll see what I can find.

I finally got around to downloading and installing the New XBOX Experience today. It's pretty. The avatars are fine, I guess. Wheee.

I finished Crisis Core; expect a review. I'm trying to decide between Final Fantasy Tactics and Killzone Liberation for my next PSP endeavour.