cottonmather0

My external hard drive has been giving me a lot of trouble lately and has finally died. I'm going to go buy a new one this weekend to handle my time machine backups, but there was some other stuff on the old drive (music and videos) that I don't have backed up. Ergo, I need to find someone who can try and recover my data. Any recommendations for a local company? It doesn't have to be right away, I can wait until later next week but I eventually need to get it done. Thanks.

Holy Crap! Those pictures are incredible! I was watching the Astros and then clicked on this thread and turned on the News. WOW! There are throngs of people watching from the surrounding streets. Right now they say that it's contained to the warehouse and hasn't spread to the store itself.

Heck, I think once a week is being lax!

Take it one step further and don't even bother talking about cars - what business is it of ANYONE, including our benevolent national (at this stage) government, telling you that they alone can decide better than you the dividing line between what you want and what you need and what you actually can have?

It is indeed a company average, but it's based on production and carmakers are not going to produce cars that won't sell. Ergo, they'll eventually have to kill off the larger cars (or raise prices so as to not to produce and sell as many) to push people into the smaller cars and get their fleet average into the compliance zone.

He was probably high or something that late on a Saturday night. I would bet he won't ever be back, but at least you filed a police report and if it's not an isolated incident they're that much closer to catching him.

Happy to help, few questions first: Where is this? The answer for Conroe will be much different than Friendswood or Galveston. In what direction is everything oriented (does the back of the house face north or south? What's behind the back fence and the longer side (left side of your picture)? Is it entirely grass or is it mostly grass and dirt or are there any shrubs or trees at all? Do your neighbors have trees? How tall? What kind of sun and shade does the yard get during the day and different times of the year? How tall is your house? What are the drainage patterns? Towards the back? Towards the one side or the other? French drains under the driveway to the curb? That's probably enough to get started!

We were looking at houses in Telfair (Sugar Land) a couple months ago and saw what must have been these two. Two little people were walking out of the David Weekly model home trailed by a film crew as we were walking in. It was rather surreal - but the weird part was seeing the guy climb into the driver's seat of an otherwise normal looking SUV and drive off, followed by the crew in a second vehicle. I'm sure the car had some kind of special modifications on the inside for him to drive it, but it was certainly bizarre to watch from the outside. The David Weekly saleslady said it was for a "TV show," so now we know what it was.

My neighbor was just over on Droxford and got the same story. That the guy that was missing apparently shot at the door and then ran off around the side of the house and straight across the drainage easement in back and through the first unlocked gate he could find, which was the house 2 doors down from me where all the cops were congregating in my first post. They think he then made it through to the front and took off down Ella and got away down south by 11th street. The police told my neighbor who had the beer stolen out of her garage that the guy must have been in there much earlier in the night before all the ruckus started and that's unlikely he stopped for a beer while the cops where chasing him. Nonetheless, scary stuff.

Kury @ Shirkmere

We were woken up early this morning by an HPD helicopter circling the neighborhood before sunrise. I finally went outside around 6:30 and saw police cars with flashing lights up and down our street and parked down at the end of the cross street, too. Cops were going house to house with a K-9 unit. Eventually they congregated on the house two doors down from us and the helicopter was literally hovering over our house. My wife went outside and talked to one of the cops in front of our house and he said that someone had caught a "gang" of car burglars somewhere in the neighborhood and now they were tracking them down. He told my wife to go back inside since they still hadn't caught the guys yet. A few minutes later they came running down to my neighbor's house on the other side - apparently someone had been in her garage overnight (right next to our bedroom window!) and stolen beer out of her refrigerator that match a beer bottle found down the street. The neighbor told us that the cops had said the bad guys were armed and had fired shots into at least two houses during the chase. Everyone packed up and left around 7:30 and the chopper went away, but now it's 8:15 and the chopper is back circling over the neighborhood. Wild stuff! Stay safe out there! UPDATE: Two cops and a dog just walked up my neighbor's drive with guns drawn... nothing found, but geez, that's unnerving to see in your own yard!

It doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to me. GC's are always trying to manage their cash flow and will want to get paid as soon as they have to pay a supplier or sub. I agree with Flipper, too. Save the driveway for last and don't risk it getting damaged by the other activity. You're probably getting a better deal from the concrete guy for pouring the garage slab and driveway all at once, but the extra cost of the second trip is probably worth having a pristine and clean driveway in the end.

I saw that yesterday, too. It is cool. One question: Do they change out the seat cushions or whole seats themselves for Aeros games? They look to be a different color when the ice is out.

Well, that was my first instinct - to wait until it was all finished and our agent (and my wife, too) vetoed that idea. As of this morning, I've informed them both that it will be available for showing again once I have everything finished, which will be either late this afternoon or tomorrow, but not before.

Thanks for the replies. I wouldn't say it was an overpowering stench of bleach, just kind of maybe a whiff of house cleaner in the air, but if they didn't like it, that's fine with me. It's the professionalism thing that I'm complaining about more or less: he could have given his critiques without turning his nose up in the air in 50 words or less, that's all.

This afternoon while I was wrapping up some work on our new floors and base molding (as I've explained before), the listing agency called around 2:00 to make an appointment to show the house at 3:30. Not even two hours notice, but I told them 4:00 would be fine and I started trying to clean up my construction mess and straighten up the house. Yeah, it's little bit dusty and there's furniture moved around in places where there usually isn't furniture, but our agent has encouraged us to keep showing it while the construction is going on, so I cleaned up as well as I could (pretty good, actually), and put a sign on the front door apologizing for the mess from the newly installed floors and encouraging the lookers to come back next week when the project is complete. In the process of cleaning the house I mopped the kitchen floor and the bathroom floors and there was a smell of windex and bleach in the air, but hey, I think that's a good smell because it means things are clean. Anyway, the lookers show up at 3:55 and ring the doorbell, just as I'm heading out, and I apologize for the construction mess in person and get in my car and drive off. Tonight we got this feedback from the automated system: I know this kind of stuff isn't supposed to be taken personally - and he likely expected it to be filtered through our agent and we would never see it - but for some reason this really has me stewing. We've gotten a lot of feedback on the house, both good and bad, but even as short as it is this one just feels kind of unprofessional and rude, especially considering that I EXPLAINED what was going on and invited them to come back and see the finished product. I mean, yeah, it's all business and it's his honest opinion, but for Chrissakes, it's still my HOME (not "the place") and you could be a little more professional about the whole thing, for example: I thought that was the whole point of using agents in the first place - to inject a layer of professionalism and credibility into the process. OK, rant off.

I saw that, too. I also saw a formation of three HPD helicopters fly directly over my house around 7:30 last night. Maybe all of this activity is in preparation for this: http://www.txcn.com/sharedcontent/dws/txcn...rs.6300d18.html

For all I know you're talking about our house. In our case we were getting feedback about some old flooring that people didn't like, so we lowered our price by a significant amount and STILL were getting the exact same feedback. So we eventually decided a couple of weeks ago that the implied value people were putting on the floors was much higher than the actual cost of replacing them and we went ahead and ripped them out and out something new in. Our higher price is by the amount of money we put into the new floors. We're still not asking as much as we did at the beginning, but even with the new floors I think our current price is quite comparable to the listing prices for similar houses in the neighborhood. We'll see what happens -I have no idea how that's going to work out, but it's at least an explanation of what we did. EDIT: edited for readability and drunk late night posting... yowch

On a related note, I hired a couple of guys off the street for the first time ever last week and am glad I did. They worked hard and got the job done (filling a dumpster with about 5 yards of broken tile and concrete) very quickly and saved me from having to do it after I was beat up from spending the entire previous day on my knees with the chipping hammer and wheelbarrow. I probably paid them too much relative to the market wages, but it was still worth every penny from my perspective. It was an interesting experience - when I pulled up to the street corner it was a mad dash with guys just SWARMING my pickup and opening the doors and climbing in (note to self - next time keep all doors locked). I had to yell and stomp my feet a couple of times and then just randomly picked two out of the 6 guys there and told them to climb into the bed of the truck. Nobody asked what kind of work it was or for how much, they just wanted in. Like I said, it was an interesting experience, but well worth the money, and I think it changed my opinion on the value of day labor. I think I would be more likely now to support a more formal system (like an organized center for legal workers) as it was very convenient (I wasn't trying to save money) and it saved my butt. At least that was my experience.

Thus far it seems to have worked for Rainbow Lodge. Their new location (which happens to be about 5 blocks from my house) backs up to White Oak Bayou and the Foodarama at TC Jester and Ella and, while still nice, isn't nearly as exotic or scenic as their former location. Nonetheless, the parking lot is full every weekend. Of course, the menu is I bit more original and unique than was Las Alamedas'.

Maybe HISD is on some kind of power trip because they rarely get to hassle people about getting in. Usually it's the other way around and it's the other districts that hassle Houston residents who want to get out. Ross, do you happen to live in North Forest? Is that the problem? LOL

Oh man, that hurts. I grimaced when saw that photo.

Nonetheless, it's clear from both of your posts that you really need to learn more about what Rick Perry and the others are upset about. You don't seem to get it all because it's not taxes or federal health services, nor is it "our own country and federal government."

Allen Parkway is flooded as usual, but this is the most water I've ever seen in the dog park. It normally gets some water, but I've never seen it fill up completely. Taken around 9:15 this morning:

What does taxation have to do with it? I'm pretty sure that most of the people you're sneering at have various opinions on taxation but would agree that disease control and public health are legitimate governmental responsibilities. Out of control federal entitlement spending and unfunded mandates to state governments for even more of the same, probably not so much. It would be nice if the people who make fun of the tea party movement - and politicians like Rick Perry and Mark Sanford - would actually try and understand it rather than make strained jokes about at all being about income taxes.