Google search “Sounding hook” or “Van Buren sounding”
And get ready to get a glimpse of a world you, until now, didn’t know existed….
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You left a warning, and I still wasn’t ready.
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Thanks, this is actually really helpful.
For clarity, the $150 was best-case (basically just the labor) and $600 was specifically if multiple heads are dead and he has to buy a donor drive to replace them.
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I should probably do this here on my work computer, my phone screen is pretty small.
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I imagine that it’s like the story about picasso and the napkin, where a woman approaches picasso at a cafe and says she’s a huge fan and hands him a napkin and asks for a drawing.
Picasso takes the napkin and does a quick drawing and then hands it back to her and asks for $10,000.
The woman is taken aback and says “how can you ask $10,000 for something that took you 5 minutes??”
Picasso says “my dear it took a lifetime to draw this in five minutes”.
So, while this famous story may or may not be apocryphal in nature, the point is that the value of the work is not always apparent at the surface level and maybe the guy is really worth the cost of his recovery service.
One thing that might make you feel better is to keep the drive in a drawer with the promise of potential recovery should the day ever come when you need it, however you may then miss your window of free recovery from seagate and to me, maybe sending the device to the data specialist hard drive company to let them do their special work is a roll of the dice that is worth taking before deciding you need the picasso of data recovery to sketch you out something on a napkin.
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Having been to the Musée Picasso, which is mostly juvenilia donated to the state to settle a huge inheritance tax bill, I don’t think it took him a lifetime to learn to draw; he just did it all the time, producing a huge amount of work, not all of which was genius-level. The napkin story (these are all apocryphal, of course) I remember is the one where he meets a contractor at a café to talk about an addition on his villa. The contractor isn’t getting what he wants, so he draws a bit on his napkin, and says, “What would this cost?”, and the contractor replies, “Nothing, maestro, just sign the napkin.”
Makes it more clear what the money is really about, but doesn’t help @KingDuppy much.
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Sometimes you just have to take the story in the spirit that it was intended.
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And what, I may ask, is miserable about that?
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That’s what I do, yes. It works pretty well most of the time.
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if your life needs more misery then be it’s proponent, I’m just using the story to demonstrate that perhaps while the magic technician demonstrates his value through working miracles, that maybe kingduppy is valuable enough without proof of his past work to continue on in the present when he probably needs the $600 more than he needs the HD.
Today is not going to be a good day. I think I’m logging out.
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You’re a better man than I am.
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It could be that there is no problem - that things are as good as they could possibly be due to perfect decision making at every turn by everyone with any authority to make decisions. If there is a problem then solving it probably requires a bigger picture approach than simply focusing on mods.
If it were up to me (and it absolutely should not be), I would create a single public forum (possibly with sub-forums) for new members. Upon signing up, you are dumped there. After receiving upvotes/hearts/whatever from ten different people who you have replied to (presumably helping with a quesrtion/issue, but that is much harder to determine than a reciprocal like) then you get access to the rest of the forum.
There is a lot of opportunity to play with the specific rules, but essentially you want to create a system that is structured to incentivize good behavior. This serves as a force multiplier, making the job of mods easier. (and also serves as a success metric - if the mods’ workload increases then the structural solution was a failure and needs to be reconsidered)
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Some sort of probationary mechanism would definitely help, but it would need logistical support to avoid moderator overload. Discourse has the concept of trust levels, but I think this is used mostly to limit access to the marketplace and posting of images. I don’t know how they work in general because my own case was unusual.
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Sorry if I contributed to pushing you away. But at least I know you’ll be back tomorrow.
Denied soldier.
Get your ass back here and start shoveling with the rest of us.
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Final stage very promising interviews not achieving positive results.
Feeling useless at 50. 
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Other Discourse forums use trust levels to restrict access to certain threads and topics, and I’d be very much in favour of that here too, mod workload permitting of course.
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Do you have a sense of how this might work practically? It might require a restructuring of categories. Something like “newcomers can’t post in new gear threads” would help, I think. In some ways, Elektronauts is a victim of its own success. It is a more attractive place to discuss electronic gear and its uses in general. I note that, despite the existence of a de facto main forum to discuss iOS music apps, at least one prominent developer chooses to engage here, rather then there, and people there have to resort to posting screenshots from here.
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I don’t know the nuts and bolts of it, but that’s pretty much how it works elsewhere, just like marketplace access here, I believe.
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