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Everyone entering my lounge has made comment about my stemware obsession, particularly because I had just about everything with the exception of my blue/green glasses in boxes. I’ve been looking around online for some sort of solution, but haven’t had a whole lot of success. I finally stumbled across this wire stemware rack, four feet wide and eighteen inches deep… for a lovely cost of $80. Now, I was almost ready to pay that, just because I knew it would satisfy the vast majority of my storage needs, but, ehh… I bet I could build it for less than that; you know me, I’ll build anything, lol, judging by the coffee table, side table, and tv stand previously built… and of course, the shelving for the bar.

Off to Lowes I went, basic measurements in hand, I knew I’d need 13 THIN planks, 13 square rods of some sort, and two four foot lengths of something. As long as the total cost was less than $80, preferably much less, it would work.

My first choice was pine, very cheap, and I’d have no qualm painting it, it’s just crappy pine afterall. Well, they had 3/8th inch planks, but they seemed a tad too thick for this purpose. I walked over to the poplar section, discovering that it really wouldn’t cost much more to build it out of that ‘better’ wood. They even had the square dowl rods (if you can call them that when they’re not round?) in poplar. Hmmm, but could I paint poplar…? It would be an injustice, truly, so I needed to pick up some stain too. Mmmm… ebony stain, yes, that’s the brown/black, espresso, chocolate, whatever you want to call it that my new (to be purchased) dining table is finished with… perfect.

The beauty of custom built furniture, or whatever you’d call this, is that it is designed exactly to meet my specifications, lol… I can hang two rails of martini glasses next to each other without them bumping into each other… I can hang six champagne flutes on the same rail without them bumping into each other, it’s brilliant. If all I would be hanging were champagne flutes this stemware rack would hold a whopping 72 of them! Judging by the average holding capacity of five wine glasses (much better than the TWO of my purchased racks below) I can hang 60 wine glasses! Most of my martini glasses are fairly wide, so I can fit just about three onto the rack, which kind of sucks, that’s only one better, but for the smaller bells I can fit four, which is great.

For the technically curious…

The planks that form the ‘top’ of the tee (when inverted) are made of 1/4″x2.5″ poplar, 18 inches in length . The rods that form the vertical tee portion are 5/8th’s inch square and, of course, 18 inches in length. These are joined together with three number 4 screws 1/2″ in length. To prevent cracking of this ‘hard’ wood, I drilled 1/16″ pilot holes, on top of that I have 7/64th” shank holes, and to countersink I have 1/4″ holes… so yes, folks, that’s drilling THREE holes for every screw. There are, in total, 39 of these number four screws. Trust me, one needs to drill all of these special holes or one WILL split the wood to pieces. To attach the rod to the strips at the front and back I used number six screws one inch in length. Same deal, three holes for each screw… 5/64th” pilot, 9/64th” shank, and 1/4″ countersink. Of course, if I had some dandy countersinking bit I wouldn’t have to do all that extra work, but really it took only a couple additional seconds per screw hole. There are 26 of these screws/holes to attach all of the rods to the two bars. I did a slight faux paux by attaching the rods to the bars on the same side as I’d attach the planks, and since my countersink job wasn’t the greatest, lol, some of the planks were a little wonky, but it looks fine. As always, wood glue all pieces together before drilling the pilot holes and screwing them together. This thing is going to hold a considerable dollar amount of glassware, so one doesn’t want to skimp! Oh, and the bars at the front and back are made of 1″x1.5″ poplar, that isn’t so important really, but you want something sturdy. The planks on the left and right ends are 1.5″ wide, no need to use a huge 2.5″ plank for that. Btw, all of these pieces are available conveniently at Lowes, of course the poplar comes in 24″ lengths, unlike the pine which is available in 18″ lengths. I chose to chop all pieces to 18″ because the square dowl rods are pretty damn pricey and they come in 36″ lengths… cheaper to waste the poplar planks than have lots of dowl left over.

The math to figure out spacing, as one would expect, drove my non-math-able brain a bit nutty. The mounting bars are 48″ long, you want twelve “slots” so you’ll need thirteen rails, with 11 2.5″ wide planks and 2 1.5″ planks. Subtracting the width of the two rods on the ends gives me (48″ – 5/8th – 5/8th) 46.75″, which I’ll then divide by twelve (since there are twelve slots), and that gives me a spacing for the 13 rods of 3.75 (roughly, to get more precise is practically impossible, unless you really want to measure in 32nd’s?). Mark off the hanging bars with this measurement, that gives the ‘on-center’ placement. Mark off 5/16th’s on each side of those marks and you’ll have the perfect ’slot’ for those rods. Mark off all these lines with the two bars aligned with each other and use some sort of carpenter’s square/triangle (preferably) so you are sure they are as straight as possible.

I used number six screws two inches in length to attach the rack via the front & rear bars directly into the ceiling joists… One could also use eyelets and chain, but that wouldn’t look right for my purposes. At least, lol, I THINK they’re in the joists, otherwise I’ll have some horrible crash one of these days, haha. There are nine screws holding it up, six in the front (because there will be more pressure on the front due to loading & unloading of glasses) and three in the rear.

And, you want to know the cost of this spectacular stemware holder? …Forty dollars! That includes the stain, screws, and wood. I used Minwax wipe-on poly, which I already had, and I already had all the sandpaper and crap necessary, but, really, it’s real wood, hardwood (well, it isn’t pine, lol), and it’s the exact finish as other furniture I’ll be making or buying. The rails are wide enough so that I can hold anything without dreaded clinking of the glasses together… score!

I rescued all of the data on the 60GB drive, and I have a brand new 120GB drive on the way from Newegg. I have the 60GB drive sitting on the desk at the moment, out of the system, so just maybe I’ll be able to use it to copy the data onto the new drive. If it starts acting up again I’ll be able to copy it over from my other drives though, so that’ll work. Bases are covered… unless of course the other drives fail, and if so… well… to hell with it all! argh! Lol…

Lastnight after an overfilling dinner at Red Lobster, friend Matthew, Mum, and myself headed over to walmart as we each needed to get a few things… of course why else go there? ;)

I had seen this pink faux tiger fur in Hagerstown and thought it’d be a fun & kitschy sort of fabric for accent pillows. That was until I couldn’t find it here at home… and stumbled across purple faux polar bear fur! It was a mutual sort of OH MY GOD! moment… ;)

So, of course, I just had to buy a yard of it and two big bags of polyfill. I went to work this afternoon cutting the fabric (and now have purple fuzz EVERYWHERE) and here we go… the ultra fabulous modernized retro accent pillows…

Well… I’m learning to loathe this message:

The problem has occurred looks like a hardware problem. If you have bad blocks, we advise you to get a new hard drive, because once you get one bad block that the disk drive internals cannot hide from your sight,the chances of getting more are generally said to become much higher (precise statistics are unknown to us), and this disk drive is probably not expensive enough for you to you to risk your time and data on it. If you don’t want to follow that follow that advice then if you have just a few bad blocks, try writing to the bad blocks and see if the drive remaps the bad blocks (that means it takes a block it has in reserve and allocates it for use for of that block number). If it cannot remap the block, use badblock option (-B) with reiserfs utils to handle this block correctly.

Even though I’ve had success with copying everything on my mp3 drive (YAY!!) thus far the first of the two 40GB drives is still failing, but, ehhh… thankfully they are not nearly as important.

Later… The second drive 40GB drive exhibits the same errors as the first 40GB drive, bleh, I can’t really remember what was on them though, so I guess they are not so important. I mean, I know they held the backups of the mp3s, so that’s unnecessary at this point, but… what else did they store? Oh well…

I requested and received the RMA for both of the 40GB drives. I just need to dig out the packing material and get them sent off, of course, errm, yeah.

The 60GB drive is out of warranty, even though it was manufactured later, they must have changed the warranty period after that or something, bastards. Just for “shits and giggles” I attached that drive to the fileserver again, curiously the fsck worked and found no errors. I was even able to mount it, and thus far it is actually working without reporting I/O errors to the system log.

Hmmmmm…. temporary malfunction? Or am I being given some sort of karmic grace period for data retrieval? Maxtor’s drive utility DID give an error code and DID say the drive was failing, so I’m not going to risk just using the drive even if it appears to be working.

It’ll be ‘fun’ trying to find 50GB of storage now that I’m down 3 drives, but I’m going to do my best to get all the data off that drive tonight, the more I save the less work required to rebuild my music archive.

I’m hoping, provided I can successfully capture the data on the failing 60GB drive that I’ll also be able to rescue data from the two 40GB drives. I’ll just need to buy another large drive very, very soon so I can actually have a place to put all this data.

I was sitting here, not really sure at this point what I was doing because I dropped it all, and I heard one of the most scary noises one can hear coming from my local fileserver. *Grate* *Click* *Click* *Grate*

Oh shit…

A/C off, TV off, as silent as it can be with two computers running full bore. *Click* *Grate* *Grate* *Click*

I try to access HDC on the fileserver, while simultaneously tailing the message log… I’m seeing “Drive not ready seek complete error,” I’m seeing i/o errors, I’m seeing DMA errors… Oh shit. The SMB Browser is lagging, causing all of Gnome to lag… HDC isn’t loading.

HDC is my mp3 archive… 60GB of music I’ve collected since the dawn of my owning a cdrom drive.

I realize that I’m not an idiot, I back my data up… to other drives. I take precautions against drive failure, if need be I could pull the data off the drive — if possible — and store it elsewhere until I can replace the drive.

I do something utterly foolish and reboot the fileserver. It could be that the DMA setting or some sort of background daemon is interfering somehow, even though I know that is unlikely.

I type “df -h” and see not only HDC missing, but HDF, and HDE are ALSO missing from the list.

Take a guess at what HDF and HDE are used for?

….backing up the mp3s on HDC.

This cannot happen, a failure of three drives at the same time. HDE and HDF are identical, manufactured on the same day, same model, exactly. All three drives are Maxtor, a company I have come to rely upon for quality; I use no other brand of drive… with the exception of that in my iBook and workstation where I did not personally choose the brand.

Two of the three drives are still under warranty, of course, with the failure of these drives it means that I have lost two thirds of my mp3 collection… easily. The only remaining “backup” is that of my iPod. I a t least know that unless something has happened to it also, that I still have all of my favorite music.

If I were overly paranoid I might just say that there’s some sort of conspiracy going on here… what a coincidence that three harddrives containing mp3s suddenly stop working, the RIAA blew up my fileserver (and, no, it is not open to the public, do you think I’m totally insane?).

I was hoping that perhaps the IDE controller had failed… but that wouldn’t explain why HDD was still working. HDE & HDF are also on the same controller, perhaps it had failed… perhaps the cables had suddenly shorted or broken, snapped, whatever.

I swapped cables, I swapped power plugs, I swapped the controllers that each drive uses… no luck, same errors, same lack of ability to mount… bad magic number errors, bad superblock errors… fsck tells me flat out that the drives are failing and to throw them away. It’s a lost cause.

I go to Maxtor’s support website and remember they require their diagnostic app to be run against any drives that RMA would be requested for… I open the side of my workstation and one by one run the diags on each drive. Each drive shows failure.

The vast majority of those mp3s, well, I COULD re-rip… I have the actual cds… still, of course finding them, well, that’s another story. SO, uhm…. yeah, I’m so royally fucked. I know I had other stuff on one of the drives… but I honestly can’t remember what it was at this point, movies perhaps… or maybe it was one of my empty drives… who knows. I can say though that I still have all my porn (haha) and I do have the vast majority of my movies still available on the 120GB drive… *Sigh*

And, really, the week hadn’t been going too badly, with the exception of… quite a lot actually, err… I guess the freelance job, and the prospect of getting paid quite handsomely sort of overrode the bad shit, and the paypal problem seems to be fixed… oh well, at least I can buy a new drive; of course I already figured out what I was buying with my freelance money, fuck again.