I am presently in Seattle for the MVP Summit which starts tomorrow. Though I am not an SBS MVP I am part of the MVP Family which means that when I booked my hotel room for the week I did so in the same hotel as the SBS MVPs. There are probably forty people on my IM list in the same hotel this week - really cool actually.
About six weeks ago one of my hard drives went bad, and I have just not had the time to deal with it. Well today Steven Lai and I went to Fry's (remember Fry's from my post on customer service?) and discussed it, and we bought an IDE to USB adapter to plug the disk into my laptop... step one of recovery.
This evening now that I had the drive hooked up I went looking for recovery tools, and wouldn't you know it most of them only work on Windows XP (my XP laptop is in Florida). I figured it wouldn't hurt to see if anyone had an alternative so I blasted the newsgroups and our listserve with the request. Not three minutes later Kevin Royalty (Steven's roomie) rang and told me that not only was his laptop running XP, but he had the tool... bring the drive and let's give it a shot.
Sure enough as we speak the data is recovering - a slow process but one that should be done by morning. I am very excited because though everything is backed up to DVDs in Montreal, lord knows when I would have the time to restore everything.
I look forward to being able to return the favour to Kevin but the truth is this is what MVPs do... we support our peers. Kevin is a good guy - a user group leader from the Ohio / Kentucky region. I have not met too many people here yet who were not nice and passionate people, because to be an MVP you have to have that passion and be willing to share it with others. These traits should not begin and end with MVPs. Join a newsgroup, answer some questions... maybe ask some of your own. By being part of the community we all become richer.