12.21
I got a Christmas gift from w00t on Friday, well, a gift for myself. The desktop I built in early march was about out of harddrive space. Cue the woot off $40 500 gig harddrive. I figured it would be pretty simple to get all my data and my windows 7 partition moved across to the bigger disk. That was a big miscalculation. I must have tried six or eight disk cloning tools. I know I tried ShadowVolume, HDClone, Clonezilla among others. I also tried just using the Windows 7 backup tool to make an image file which I loaded off another machine on my network. All were met with frustration, swearing and failure. The files would transfer fine Windows 7 boot loader/ boot manager is apparently very touchy and didn’t like my attempts at recreating it on the new disk.
It was a good exercises in things NOT to done when doing tech projects. At first I was quite careful to make sure I always had at least one working partition, but by the second day of the process I eventually got in a hurry when I thought I saw success and ended up reducing to a completely broken computer. Fortunately, I still had my backed up image (see, see, I’m not completely irresponsible) on my netbook. I managed to get that restored back on the original harddrive. Then I gave Easeus’s free Disk Copy software a try. It turned out to be quite a pleasant experience compared with some of the others, which required booting off of a CD or a USB key. It went right to work and made a perfect transfer right from windows. The only minor caveat I’d throw in if anyone is considering it is you need to have three active drives going for it to work while windows is running, one for the source, one for the target, and one to use as swap space. I used a USB key, but another SATA drive might be faster. Needless to say I am back up and running with plenty of space for photos etc.
In between trying to clean my apartment and yelling at my computer I went out to poke around at some Christmas shopping. As I was poking around, curiosity caught me when I saw the grand opening of a new pawn shop on Sam Rittenberg Blvd. Pawn shops in general are a new thing for me, they weren’t very common at all in Pittsburgh, or at least the parts of it I frequented. They seem to be everywhere in Charleston. I thought I might snag something for a Christmas gift so I poked around when this caught my eye:
Curiosity got the better of me. It’s a tenor horn, silver and it seemed pretty solid but I really wasn’t familiar with the brand. Still, I wrote down the serial number and the branding info and took it home. A little bit of internet poking and I turned up a lead to this sales article from 1922! The sax was made actually manufactured by Beuscher one of the major manufacutures, before they were bought out by selmer and turned into a stencil themselves. Apparently it was pretty common for music stores to buy instruments form major manufactures and to have them stenciled with the store brand. The serial number is 4xxx which, if the internet is to be trusted, and the serial number on the stenciled horns were consistent with that on the native horns means it was manufactured in 1905 or earlier!
I went back in today and play tested it. She was repadded somewhere along the way, and still plays like new, or, at least as well as I can given how long it’s been since I played. I admit I felt a twinge of guilt at bringing it home when I was supposed to be Christmas shopping but some things are too pretty to pass up. If anyone has any more information about Beuscher’s of that vintage, send it my way. I’d be interested in the lineage.
That being said. Merry Christmas to me! Happy Holidays to everyone if I don’t talk to you before Christmas!