Please don’t get sick, the banks need the money

Wonderful contrasting news stories today:

The Catalan Healthcare system cuts 900 million euros

Cuts have been introduced to the public expenditure of the Catalan healthcare system. Today, the Catalan Minister for Health, Boi Ruiz, met with a hundred directors and presidents of Catalan hospitals to announce the measures to cut the budget of the Catalan healthcare system. The Catalan Government is the public administration in charge to provide public healthcare to Catalan citizens and is responsible for all the primary health centres and hospitals, including the main university hospitals. Ruiz announced a budget reduction of 900 million euros

And then this:

CatalunyaCaixa would need at least 1,500 million euros to reach the 10% of ‘core capital’

The new Spanish law on savings banks, which is stricter than Basel III, will require savings banks to have 10% of ‘core capital’ by September 2011. Currently, CatalunyaCaixa has 6.9% and would need between 1,500 and 1,700 million euros to reach the minimum requirement.

Naturally, the banks will be recapitalized in an obscure enough way (via FROB or some other scheme) to hide the true cost to taxpayers.

Hard drive recovery

We were stupid enough to forget to backup the computer that had all of our kids photos on them for the last year. We noticed when our computer wouldn’t boot anymore due to the hard drive not responding.

Our company has a Barcelona-based company they recommended for data recovery, but they were hugely expensive (like starting at a thousand euros). I did some research on my own and found a small local company called PCColoma that offered hard disk recovery for a mere 200 euros + IVA.

They had to order a firmware upgrade tool from Seagate, and once they had it, they sent us a UPS sticker for picking up the drive. A couple days later they had the drive up and working, and emailed us a directory listing of the root directory. One Paypal payment later, the drive was on the way and everyone lived happily ever-after.

We have also learned our lesson and have a separate NAS box sitting in the basement doing daily backups of all our computers.