RRRRAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!! Ahem...excuse me. Here at FYN there are many things that we nerd out about. With that said, some topics resonate more with some than others. This is one of those topics for me. I've been a metalhead since middle school and have always flown the Flag of Hate high and with pride. As I've aged, my taste in metal has grown more extreme as well as more diverse, resulting in a very broad spectrum of styles and sub-genres that I enjoy. Somethings that remain constant throughout, though, is the need for a driving groove, top notch musicianship and a good dose of ripping speed.

Throughout my life, metal has continued to evolve and mature (one of the few music genres that hasn't gone stagnant imo).  As new takes on old styles emerge, new blood enters the scene and...well, some just continue to kick major ass! While from the outside things may seem violent and negative, for the most part, this is far from the truth.

Being a metalhead means that you belong to a worldwide family of people that all share a deep emotional bond with this music. One of main draws to metal is that it is an extremely empowering entity in our lives. Have a bad day? Metal is there for you. Going through a breakup? Metal is there for you. Feeling completely alone and lost? Metal is there for you, letting you know that there are others out there that have/are going through the same thing and understand. It is this bond that I feel is unique to this genre. On the flip side, it can just be a damn good time to listen to/experience. Through this brotherhood (and sisterhood), I can't count how many times I've gone to a show and just struck up a random conversation with someone I've never met before, as if I've known them for years.

This documentary came out a while ago, but I recommend it to anyone that is a fan of metal or (even more so) not. It was made by anthropologist and fellow metalhead Sam Dunn and does a great job expanding on the points above, while also delving into its rich history.

Now, for the real reason of this post:
As you can see, the first image I included in this post is indeed a tour poster! I will be heading out Friday night to see the mighty Amon Amarth, Enslaved and Skeletonwitch! If you checked out my previous post on Mead Making, you would have recognized the Swedish viking metal masters Amon Amarth. They are headlining the tour to support their latest and ninth full-length album, entitled:

These guys are veterans of the scene and are known to put on a ridiculous show. I've been a long time fan, but I'm super stoked as it will be my first time seeing them.

The band giving them directly support will be Enslaved. They are another veteran group of viking metal warriors from Norway, but with a different direction to their music. Using a unique blend of progressive elements and extreme/black metal they have garnered fans from many different directions. They are another band very highly regarded for their musicianship. They will be touring in support of their twelfth studio album entitled: 

The opening band and possibly the one I'm most excited to see is Ohio's Skeletonwitch. These guys put out their first album in 2004 and have been gaining steam ever since. Their music style is a mix of thrash, black, death and traditional heavy metal, making for a very energetic and catchy unique sound. Their latest album is definitely some of their best work and while it only clocks in at about 30 minutes, its one hell of a ride! The album is entitled:

A concert such as this calls for a healthy dose of mead pre-gaming (gotta be authentic), before taking the rainbow road to Asgard, of course. Hopefully, a Skeletonwitch zip hoodie and perhaps some other merch will be in my future as well. All in all its looking like it will be one hell of a night!

p.s. I'll try to remember to take some pictures/video so I can give you guys an update/review of the show.

Recently, a friend of mine upgraded his home computer in order to better handle future design work that he was going to be undertaking. Being that his "old" system was still pretty nice, when he asked if anyone was interested in buying it at 50% current part prices, I grabbed it up right away. My old rig was still performing pretty good gaming wise, but it was starting to show its age with a random restart issue every 1-2 weeks (new power supply did not fix it etc). So Instead of dumping more time and money into it, I figured, "why not?"

The case was a pretty slick BitFenix Prodigy case that my friend had stuffed to the gills with fans. I don't have the fancy LED's, but yes, the front fan is friggin' huge and spans the entire width of the front panel.

Guts:
-i5 2500k-
-8gb GSkill DD3 PC1600-
-M4 SSD 120gb-
-Noctura CPU Cooler-
-H67 M-ITX board-
-TX650M Corsair psu -

I also opted for extra USB ports on the front instead of the disk drive.

He decided to keep his video card (780ti) so I pulled the trigger on a EVGA GTX 770 (from NewEgg of course).

I'll be honest, this was my first time buying a card of this performance level or price-range, so I was stoked to do some benchmarks. I picked up BioShock Infinite and Total War: Shogun 2 during the Steam Sales and figured that they would be proper candidates.

But first, it was time to.......

My first step was to go after my hard drives. I did a clean install of Win7 on the SSD, but since it is only 120gigs I transferred over the two drives I had in my old rig (1.5TB and 500gb drives) as well. Over the years I had accumulated duplicate files (not intended) between the two drives and just needed to clean things up in general. I dealt with the 500gb drive no problem - transferring the remaining files over to the 1.5TB drive and doing a reformat.

I had already been going at it all day when I decided to pop open the Win7 Disk Management utility*. I was mentally fatigued at this point, but since my 1.5TB drive was coming from my old Dell, I wanted to see what sort of wonky partitions had been setup.

There was my large main partition and then two smaller ones. No big deal, I thought that I'd just combine them and be done with it.

*The picture here is just for reference, and is/was not my actual drive partitions.

And this is where the title of my post ties in:
I wasn't paying attention 100% and wound up deleting my main partition...after I had formatted my back-up drive and before I was able to copy the files back over......over 600gb worth of files....

I stayed up until 4am freaking out and doing research as to how I might recover from this tragedy. I immediately downloaded some free/trial versions of partition software hoping that I would find an answer ASAP. With the limited capabilities of the trial versions I was at least able to do some scans and see that my data was still there somewhere. I tried some older boot-disk versions, but the programs were just not powerful/too limited to do what I needed. At that point, I had to get up for work in 4-5hrs so I begrudgingly resigned for the night. Thankfully, because of the adrenaline dump, I fell right asleep.

Before I left for work the next day I setup another free program (TestDisk) to run in hopes that I would be greeted with good news upon returning home. Unfortunately, These efforts were fruitless as well.

Out of options, I spent the best $39 I have ever spent. I installed Partition Wizard and within 5min I had ALL of my files back! It was literally: start program, click maybe ten times on buttons/tabs, partition recovered.

If you follow me on twitter you would have seen me sing its praises and promise a blood sacrifice in it's honor.

Lessons learned:
-Always backup in triplicate
-Don't mess with your data late at night
-Spending a few bucks can be worth more in mental sanity than in your wallet.

Moving forward, before this scare happened, I was planning on using my old Dell to setup a NAS (Network-attached storage) box anyway. I've decided to use an unRAID setup by LimeTech. I'll be sure to document the build for a future post. Until then, back that data up!

It is very simple to make and only requires three ingredients: water, yeast and honey. As the yeast ferments, it is fueled by the sugar in the honey and gives off the byproducts CO2 and our dear friend alcohol. Usually mead will be known as sweet or dry and with its climbing popularity can be found in most wine retailers. That being said, nothing compares to your own product!

Next time: making the nectar of the gods!

Throughout the weekend, the con did seem more organized but there was visually a higher person per capita. This did result in having to scavenge for open games from time to time, making standouts like Time Crisis 2 always taken.  All that's not to say that I didn't get hours of gaming in...but you can always game a few more.

The music was just as good as last year's, with exception to the headliner (in my opinion at least). One of the major highlights though, was at the end of the Triforce Quartet's set. For their final piece they played a medley of theme songs from everyone's favorite two shows about southern zombies and frozen zombies. I apologize for the shakiness - it was an "interesting" weekend.

Next con: PAX East!