Yesterday I noticed a seaplane taking off quite close to the Marina. I wondered if Jimmy Buffett have been visiting. Then I saw it again, or one very much like it, coming back, and noticed a huge amount of smoke in the sky to the east. Just as I did this someone said there is a major forest fire not far away.
So, I did a little looking online and found that there have been a lot of major fires along this part of the coast of Turkey. Thousands of acres and hectares destroyed. Some towns, many homes, and a few people, are no longer with us.
They stopped flying at dusk and resumed at dawn and they are coming through very frequently now. There are obviously at least 3 seaplanes, perhaps more. It looks to me like they’re painted with the Spanish national colors. So I wonder if they’ve been borrowed from Spain. It seems logical to share a resource like that.
I am quite aware that the scientists now believe that having a fire every once in a while is actually good for the forests. But it is certainly not good for the large amount of personal property that has been destroyed. Or for the people that have been killed. Or even for the people that own the land or their livelihood depends on it being a beautiful forest. I hope they solve the problem soon.
The weather is beginning to cool off and I hope I can get more work done. For a lot of the summer, it was hard to do anything productive after about 10 AM. Because it would be too hot unless I was sitting in front of a fan. It is one of the reasons that I try to get up at dawn.
Computer troubles again:
I have a lot of information stored on external hard drives. And during the day yesterday both my computers suddenly stopped recognizing the drives. At all. Zero.
Normally, when I connect the drive through a USB cable, or turn on the power to that drive if it is already connected by USB, after a very short time, the computer notices and makes the drive available. But suddenly, both of my computers stopped noticing that anything had changed. It seemed to have no idea that I had connected anything of any description.
I did the usual troubleshooting with no success. I tried other USB cables, in case that was the problem. I looked and looked and looked for a solution online for hours, but I could not find anything that applied to my problem. So, I was experimenting with connecting other external drives to the computer and I found that they worked just fine. So, I then connected one of the problem drives. And the first one works perfectly. So does the other one.
This would be good news, except that I have absolutely no idea why they refused to work for about 12 hours. Therefore, I can expect that the problem will come back someday.
I am doing scans of the drives to see if there is some sort of virus on them. But they are large drives, and it will take a while to get the answer. I believe I have good antivirus software, so I’m not expecting to find anything.
It is my understanding, that understandably, most antivirus software scans for the usual suspects. But perhaps not for old viruses. As I transfer data from older hard drives, to the new computers, it occurs to me that perhaps my mystery problems are due to some sort of virus or similar problem, that I bring with me from my old drives. Could be. I certainly have more mystery problems than any other 5 people I know. It gives me a lot of practice at troubleshooting.
It is no wonder why I have gray hair.
Have lots of fun,
David
Alegria1976's Blog 
Dave, a lot of external drives behave like this. The most stable one I have found is the 500 mb Seagate. The 1 Tib drive is not nearly as stable and uses a different connection. I even had a 2 Tib drive just give it up. The data could not be retrieved. It worries me since I relie on those to backup my data and pictures!