Being In Love

How do you know when you are in love? Is love a decision, something you feel, what? As I think about the question I remember two occasions when I thought I was in love, and, once when I didn't know until after the fact. I don't know which time was the real deal.

As I have written before in other articles sex confuses your feelings and clouds your judgment. Before I got married there was a girl whom I met while traveling. We met briefly one night at a casino. A few nights later she agreed to go out with me. We had dinner. We talked for a few hours. Then we ended up going to bed together. After I left her city we started to write to each other. We wrote for about a year. During that time we began to express love for one another. Then she came to visit me where I was living at the time.

We continued where we left off. The sex was great and we did it more and more. I really believe that I was in love but perhaps I shouldn't have been. It turns out that our religious beliefs so conflicted that we were not able to come to any common ground. The sex blinded both of us to this «elephant in the living-room» for a long while. We both thought we could make it work. Finally both of us realized that it was not going to work. We broke it off and we both were deeply hurt by the breakup. This was the most pain I have ever gone through at the time and it took nearly a year to get over.

When I was in college (McNesse State - Lake Charles, La.) 6 years before this I was very attracted to a fellow music major (girl). The first time I saw her was in Texas at a jazz festival. She was playing in the sax section of the McNeese State jazz ensemble. That's pretty much when I decided that I was going to that school. The next semester I was there.

I finally met her. Her name was Joyce. I even wrote a song for her - «A Song For Joyce.» From the time I presented it to her we kind of hung out. We never did date though. We only became friends. She was really the first real female friend I ever had. We did not do that many things together. Ever now and then we'd have coffee or something. That's all there was to the relationship.

The next semester I didn't go back to McNeese because of financial reasons. I remember lying in bed at my parents home thinking about Joyce. When I realized that I might not ever see her again (I didn't) I cried. And I cried for days. I didn't even know that I had fallen for her. I never told anyone. I had never been in love before. It was an unexpected pain. The friendship was so natural. I didn't know how much it meant to me until I didn't have it anymore.

My last relationship and subsequent marriage is the strangest. I started this article thinking about the times I thought I was in love. This was the second time I believed I was in love. As I said, I didn't know I was in love with Joyce. My relationship with the girl I married started out as most relationships do. We hung out, did things together, and eventually ended up sleeping together. I believed I was in love. I asked her to marry me and she said yes. Now as I think back about the times I was in love, this relationship does not register with the other two times.

In the other two relationships there was a lot of pain. When my marriage first began to have problems there was pain but in the end, it was mostly anger. It is hard to explain. I didn't want the marriage to end. We had two kids. We had our share of fights and I hated those. There were many times I felt that I just couldn't live up to her expectations. So there were some reasons to be glad about the relationship's end.

Perhaps because the marriage lasted longer than the other two relationships there was more time for the fights to come, and, the opportunities to hurt one another. Maybe this is why the relationship doesn't seem like one of the times when I was in love. Or maybe I wasn't in love. Maybe I was in love with the idea of being married. Who knows?

I believe that being in love should be like a great friendship. Two people who get along greatly together. People who can agree, and, who can disagree, yet, they still remain attracted to each other. They are in love. When two people are together and they aren't in love to disagree can lead to huge fights. It leads to hurt feelings. Ultimately it could mean the end of the relationship. When you are in love with one another disagreements don't mean a thing. Its just a disagreement. You are in love.

Hands On Trade Show Exhibits Lure Attendees

When trade show exhibit goers walk the vast exhibit hall floors and come upon highly creative, interactive trade show displays, they get to stop and join in some fun. The trade show attendee becomes part of the exhibit. By using experiential activity, the trade show exhibitor not only entertains but also educates their key customer prospects with entertaining hands-on experiences.

Why are such participatory activities important at trade shows? Quite simply: they boost traffic to the trade show exhibit site, leading to product interest and often substantial sales from experiencing first hand a dynamic new product.

When Event Marketer covered the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in early January 2006, they found exceptional trade show exhibits that offered interactive experiences. Here are a few exhibitors whose hands-on trade show displays showcased new product trials on the trade show floor:

Canon — Canon’s goal was to get attendees’ hands on its products. They had three hands-on display islands staffed by representatives. One of the islands featured PowerShot and EOS cameras and camcorders, another showcased printers, and the third island featured smaller digital cameras and camcorders. Canon also had a theater that mimicked a working film set with camera booms and professional stage lighting. Visitors demonstrated Canon’s new products and took photos and videos of a working model-train village choo-chooing away in their center island.

Dolby — A TrueHD Theater was Dolby’s centerpiece to run demos of its high-definition audio technology. Separate semi-enclosed zones showed off Dolby’s audio technology for HDTV home theaters, surround-sound video gaming, and PC home audio. The gaming zone offered visitors a chance to try Burnout, the new Xbox 360 racing game. The Xbox’s Dolby Digital sound technology seduced game enthusiasts to come try their new products.

Garmin — Several interactive demonstration stations helped Garmin get its portable navigation systems into people’s hands. Two circular islands each featured eight handheld navigation units for visitors to try, while plasma screens atop the stations ran videos about the products.

Nokia – The company divided sections of the trade show exhibit—which featured everything from its mobile office products to its latest Bluetooth-capable phones—to create individual environments for products and presentations. Visitors checked out the products on tables on the main floor. Nokia created interactivity with touch-screen computer kiosk booths, where trade show attendees could learn more about key product features.

Remember that people want to try before they buy. At trade shows, they want to see for themselves and be part of the action. That is why the use of interactivity works especially well at trade show displays that introduce new products and services.

How to Recover a Quick Erased CD-RW Versus DVD-RW

Because of the different standards for rewritable optical media, in particular CD-RW, DVD-RW and DVD+RW, the state of the media after a quick erase is different. This state determines if it's still possible or not to recover data with any data recovery software tool for that matter.

There is some complexity involved and you may need to read this article twice ;-)
Mainly because of the different exceptions and the role of the software vs. hardware.

First maybe the difference between a full erase and a quick erase on drive level:

I'm intentionally mentioning drive level because in most cases it's the drive that executes a blank command sent by the software. So for the software it's more or less a "hit and run" command. Send it down and walk away or poll the drive till ready.

When a full erase command is issued on re-writable optical media then the complete surface of the disc is over-written with a neutral pattern (all zeroes or all 0xAA or something like that). The result is that all data that was once present is now gone forever. There are no magical tricks to ever find the data back, the old content has been wiped completely, not even in a high end laboratory with geniuses at work would it be possible to recover the data. Additionally, the disc's structures on the inside rings, which all drives use to determine the layout of the media , have been updated to resemble empty media. All references to tracks and session that were once there are now gone.

A quick erase is meant to be quick (duh ...) and therefore the disc's main data area is left unaffected, or at least mainly unaffected. All (or most) data remains present on the disc. What changes is the disc's structures again, on the inside rings of the media. All references to tracks and session are deleted and the media is left in a state which seems like empty media for a CD/DVD writer (in most cases ... read further).

So if the bulk of the data is still there after a quick erase ... what's the problem then you ask ?
Well, the biggest problem exists for CD-RW and DVD-RW (DVD dash / minus RW).

As I explained before, during a quick erase on drive level the disc's structures are changed so that a drive sees the disc as blank media again afterwards. And that is the big problem, an empty disc - as far as the drive is concerned - is an empty disc and the drive will not allow to read anywhere on the disc. All read commands fail immediately with drive generated errors. The drive doesn't even try reading on the requested locations. At this point the drive is the limiting factor, there is no way to circumvent this as it's not possible to tell the drive there is different media inside than what the drive sees for itself (*).

The only way (*) around this problem is to send the disc to a (possibly expensive) recovery lab that may have the right equipment to deal with it. As this is a by hardware limited problem, some labs have custom made hardware to deal with this specific problem.

(*) If I notice there is more interest in this then I will dedicate another article to this problem, in particular how a handy person with too much free time could try a few things.

There is one big exception for DVD-RW (not CD-RW) if the erase software works in the spirit of the DVD+RW standard. Meaning that the software doesn't issue a "quick erase" command but instead does the erasing by itself, like it would on DVD+RW. Read further to understand.

The big exception to all the above is DVD+RW (DVD plus RW). The designers of the format were clever enough to decide that there shouldn't be an erase function for this format at all. After all a full erase only adds to the so called DOW (Disc Over-Write) and thus reduces the quality of the media. If a full erase is truly required by the user then the application software can still simply write a neutral pattern over the complete surface of the disc with the same effect. And as a DVD+RW can have only one track in one session, changing the inner circle structures is not needed either. If there is a track already ... well then there is a track already .. why change that ? If one wants to write new content then the old data can simply be overwritten. Of course this also positively influences background format and other features I won't go in to now. In other words there is no erase command that an application can send.

If a user wants to quick erase a DVD+RW then the application software must be clever enough to simply write some neutral data over file-system structures (e.g. ISO9660 and UDF etc). And in fact that's what most applications do when they quick erase a DVD+RW.

The consequence is that for a DVD drive there still is a track after a quick erase, so this is not blank media, and if there is a track with a length then, data recovery software can send read commands and get data back. And a scan for missing data can yield to positive results.

Same as with DVD-RW there is a big exception. The reason is that in the beginning not all drive manufacturers understood the philosophy and spirit of the well thought out "no erase command" principle. So what they did was make sure that a format command basically does what an erase command did and then they informed all software vendors, which were obviously confused, that they should send a format command instead of a blank command. Wrong ...

To the best of my knowledge most drive vendors today have adopted the "no erase" +RW philosophy properly and recently developed drives don't erase anymore, even not when a format command is sent. The same goes for the software vendors, they too saw the light. However ... it's hard to change the world and exceptions still exist out there.

So when people ask, "I have a quick erased DVD+RW or DVD-RW ... can it still be recovered", it's difficult to give a definitive answer because it depends so much on the type and make and even firmware revision of the writer, in combination with the erase software and version of that software.

From experience, quick erased DVD+RW media, erased with a current drive and current software is very often recoverable. Chances for success degrade significantly for DVD-RW, because many applications simply send an erase command (or format command) to the drive. Quick erased CD-RW is only recoverable in the lab or with special tricks that are hard to explain here.

Hope this made sense to you ...

Terminology:
"Erase" and "Blank" are basically the same, software mostly uses the term "Erase" whereas official specifications and standards use the term "Blank", as in Full Blank or Quick Blank.

Interesting links from wikipedia explaining the different formats:

CD-RW

DVD-RW

DVD+RW

DVD-RAM