So the move to Ottawa is complete. I moved into my apartment the last week of August. It was a very tiring week as I also helped two other people move that week. I am currently in my 7th living location in 6 years so I am hoping to say here for a little while as I'm tired of moving. The move went well (I did not use U-Haul, but that is for another post), I just wish unpacking was a easy as packing. I am hoping to finish with all the boxes by the end of next week. The main delay is that I have not decided where all my furniture is going to go (my bookcase in particular).

I have been all around Ottawa in the past two weeks. I bought a bus pass for September so I would not have to worry about getting around. I have been to the market many times (large bunches of basil for $1!) and out shopping for odds and ends.

Yesterday I went out for my first bike ride in Ottawa. I don't know how many opportunities I will have to do that before it gets too cold. It was a really nice ride, about half the way towards town had a bike lane and on the way back I took the path beside the river. I estimate I did around 25km, nothing too big, just checking things out a bit. I need to get a bike map so I can figure out where all the bike paths lead.

One thing I am very excited about is that I now have a number of plants. I have been wanting plants for a long time now but before now I was living in basements apartments so plants would not have worked out. However I am now on the 12th floor and have huge windows so I went out and bought a bunch of plants. I want to get a couple more but that may have to wait until spring, I at least need to finish unpacking first.

Next week I also need to get back to job hunting.

So, for the third time in three years I have encounted a hard drive issue. The one thing that makes this time different then the past two times is that this time it was more then just a crash, the drive is dead. Not just any drive died, but my new drive that I bought because of the other hard drive crashing.

The first two times I had a crash it was my Westen Digital (WD) drive and after reformatting it, the drive still worked. This time it was my new (less then a year old) Seagate hard drive and the drive is totally dead. My computer would not even boot when the Seagate drive was attached. The one good thing about the Seagate hard drives is that they carry a five year warrenty so I just need to send it in and I should get a new one. It is just a pain in the butt to send it in and then have to reinstall everything on my computer.

Luckily two days before all of this happened I got my second computer up and running and installed Ubuntu Linux on it, so I still had internet access and a computer. Since then I put a spare hard drive in my main computer and installed Ubuntu on that as well. Now, if I can only get the two computers to talk to each other... At least I am getting a bit of experience with Linux.

Here is hoping for stable hard drive in the future.