Lightwave 9 Launch Party

Newtek introduced the latest version of Lightwave recently. They celebrated with a party at the Spider Club in Los Angeles.

There were live demos being shown. Lots of mingling. I got the feeling everybody knew each other.

A demo video was shown with interviews and highlights of the new features.


CG industry pioneer Ron Thornton received an award for his contributions.

Fry's 2.0

After bicycling in Ventura, we stopped by at the newest location for Fry's Electronics. Since I always shop at the one near me in Woodland Hills, this was a huge surpise inside. No theme, like Alice in Wonderland or Science Fiction. But it did have a really really nice cafe. I always wanted a geek-oriented shop with coffee. And this is it. :)

What if you don't have a backup?

If you have a hard disk with important data that you don't back up, you're taking a big risk. I know, who has the time to do backups?

Sometimes Murphy's Law strikes before you get a chance. I had a drive that was a bit old and was starting to go.

I searched the web for data recovery products and services. There are companies that specialize in recovering lost drives that have been formatted, crashed or smashed. Those are expensive.

I decided to try out Data Rescue PC. It has a free version that tells you what it can recover, and it showed I could get back the majority of my files. I bought the full version, which makes a bootable CD. It's good to have a 2nd drive you can copy files to, rather than restore to the same drive that got you in trouble in the first place.

I hooked up a newly formatted drive & booted the Data Rescue CD. It takes a while to scan your bad drive, but if you can get your files back it's worth the wait. After a scan, it can save the scan results (another reason to have a good drive connected) so you can restore some files now, and others later.

It will rate the files it finds with a probability of whether it can successfully restore them. If your drive does go bad, don't mess around with recovery tools that try to fix it. I'd prefer a non-invasive program, which is why I chose Data Rescue.

Data Rescue performed as advertized. There were some files that didn't make it, but the majority survived. Whew!

I've learned my lesson- I'm backing up my new drive!