It wasn't quite 16GB, but I discovered today that my 16GB USB drive doesn't have any of the data on it that I expected. It seems I must have grabbed it by mistake and formatted it with the new Ubuntu, making it useful as a bootable drive. I crossed my fingers that I had done, as with other drives I've used for this purpose, the right thing and copied its contents to a larger hard drive. Seems not.

The files on there had been building over some time, so I'm not actually sure what was on there. A few whitepapers and saved URLs of things I had to get back to, that I probably don't remember the reason for which I saved them in the first place. There was a copy of my MP3 directory, which during the last week or so of rebuilding my servers I've found are already copied in a half dozen places. There may be some that I've downloaded but not copied to one of those other locations, but they're probably re-findable, too.

There are probably also a handful of code and software bits that I'll copy from time-to-time. Some of these are also in other places, but some, like the one I was trying to get copied today, are now gone. Today's gem? I thought to animate a CAPTCHA image to try to foil OCR. It's a simple first pass, and totally injected in a JSP page (also available as a Servlet):

How fun is that? I tried to make it look kind of like you're looking down on bubbles. The text wavers a little and sometimes blends in with the background. Look at it for a few moments and a person (who can read) should be able to make out the characters. I'm going to add I have added some tweaks so that the characters aren't all there all the time, so that should screw up anything that grabs just a single frame...stuff like that...

Anyway, I thought I'd gripe a little, sharing my little tortures. Now, on to trying to find some of that gotta-have data.