Finally, a glimmer of hope ahead......

I've mentioned on here before about my recent bad health.

Well, after a battery of tests to counter all the crazy symptoms I have had in the last year or so I can finally say with certainty that there is something wrong with me.

It's actually isn't serious so I'll get that out of the way.

It's gallstones. With a bunch of sludge in the mix. Turns out, gallstones can play with about every organ in your body and make you feel really bad.

I'm going to go in for a gallbladder removal some time very soon and hopefully all my chest pains, stabbing liver pain, potassium levels and too many other symptoms to list might just go away after this crappy organ is removed.

Good thing I've been on a large dose of Xanax recently or I don't know how I would have dealt with the constant stress and worries.

Here's to better times!

Listia Loot- 1993 Topps Gold Cubs Team Set

Having somewhat recovered from my computer eating my files and now having a solid start to this Ubuntu install I can say that I will be posting again and here is a nice item I grabbed on Listia recently.

1993 Topps Gold Cubs team set.

I love how these cards compare to the regular ones. What they lack in color they make up for in ornate elegance.

Have a look and decide for yourself:

#3 - Ryne Sandberg

#21 - Luis Salazar

#47 - Bob Scanlan

#74 - Steve Buechele

#101 - Jim Bullinger

#128 - Kal Daniels

#156 - Sammy Sosa

#183 - Greg Maddux

#211 - Doug Dascenzo

#237 - Jose Vizcaino

#265 - Andre Dawson

#292 - Rey Sanchez

#319 - Paul Assenmacher

#346 - Chuck McElroy

#373 - Mike Morgan

#391 - Derrick May

#459 - Derek Wallace

#487 - Jessie Hollins

#533 - Frank Castillo

#563 - Shawn Boskie

#595 - Shawon Dunston

#630 - Mark Grace

#657 - Mike Harkey

#688 - Dwight Smith

#721 - Rick Wilkins

#783 - Heathcliff Slocumb

#812 - Matt Walbeck

Well, it seems some of the cards look great with the gold.

As for the others, it seems to draw attention to some of the awful photos in the set.

But, as a card collector, I love them all none the less.

The set set me back over 1,000 credits, but, since no one knows what value a credit actually has I can say with no regrets that I would rather have this set than some arbitrary online currency.

Topps Without Borders:1997

I am removing the borders from the Topps designs year by year.

This time it is 1997, a set I never collected since I was not collecting at the time.

This is the only one I have from that set.

With border:

And without the border:

I don't really feel like it looks any better or worse than the full card.

Biggerfied:

The trimmed border does make the card look cleaner. The white edge reveals the airbrush look of the green color and makes it look sloppy, but not bad.

Up next, another set I never picked up many cards of since I was not collecting at the time, 1996.

Computers are fun!!!!!!!!!:::((((((

Haven't posted here for a bit because of health and the fact that my computer recently ate itself.

Seriously, it really did eat itself.

I tried importing songs into Rhythmbox on Ubuntu by adding three hard drives and clicking OK.

Big mistake.

For some unknown reason which I have yet to fathom it sent my entire root directory into the trash bin. Rhythmbox said they were all corrupted files, so I deleted them.

What they were were all my pictures, songs, videos, scans, documents, system files and my Windows 7 partition.

Let's just say I have been in a bit of a funk for a week.

Good news is that I just used Windows 7 for Steam and playing GTA and Borderlands 1 and 2. I can just redownload those.

The linux partition which I deleted accidentally is a different beast.

I reinstalled Ubuntu from a backup dvd I made of my system back in October but that only included the OS and my config files from my home directory.

I had backed up all my pictures and documents to Ubuntu One cloud but I had stopped backing up in July so that left a big hole in my pictures and scans.

I had already uploaded all my music to Google Play Cloud, which is awesome, but there are a few which weren't uploaded recently.

I reinstalled to the partition Windows 7 had been on and did not touch my still empty linux one.

I then ran all kinds of recovery tools like testdisk, scalpel and the best one, photorec.

Photorec proceeded to recover 657,000 files off my old Ubuntu partition. Sounds great, right?

No.

They all have extensions on the ends but the file names were not preserved, they were just numbered in the order in which they were found.

It's a huge mess but as I slowly go through all the files and find most of the pictures and scans are fine, I realize all the song files are corrupt. Oh well, I'll just redownload them from Google Play, I guess.

I've been reading everyone else's posts on Google Reader until I have got this installation of Ubuntu back to how I had it.

If you use Rhythmbox, do me a favor and punch it in the face, for me.

Thanks.