I had an extra bay on the laptop and an adaptor for another drive so I decided to add a second drive and transfer all of her stuff to it. This way she would have a system disk and a data disk. About half way through the transfer my son comes into the room and accidentally knocks the laptop off from about 3′. This of course would have been ok except for the writing state that the drive was in. So primary drive dead on an 8 yr old laptop with xp on it.

I worked for about the next three hours trying various levels of recovery until I heard the dreaded knock. Chills went up my spine as I turned and said there is no hope for this drive. She of course was in a panic since I couldn’t tell her if her documents were safely transfered yet. Turns out all of them weren’t.

So now I go to plan B. take the extra drive I had just put in the system and re-install the os… except now the only drive that had the original OS is gone. Dang!

After this I ran one more checkdisk as I scavenged to find an OS disk… any OS and as I was scavenging I found two laptops that I had planned to sell but hadn’t yet… I had totally forgotten about them. So now I was on to Plan C. as I had found a windows 7 disk and assumed that her current laptop couldn’t run I took one of the newer ones up and she was ready to go about 7hrs after I started a 30 minute transfer… sheez.

Also in lue of this I scored an iPhone 3G and had planned on jailbreaking it and giving to them with MAME on it so they could play the games anywhere. What wound up happening is that I now have a 3G phone that sticks on the ipsw restore about 3/4 of the way through. So while all of this laptop trouble is going on I am trying to search forums for a clue of how to bring it back. (this is still unresolved, if you have ideas please comment.)

To make this story even better I’ll add a third layer. While I was dealing with the laptop fiasco and the phone my Mighty Mouse also decides to go all screwy and every time I would touch it Expose would either come or go. So I also had a mighty mouse tore open on my desk.

So my in-laws decided to stay the night and leave in the morning due to the delay and as I write this post I am just now finishing up on that 30 minute job.

Here is to a better tomorrow
David Bates

I start my days around 5:00 each morning the first thing I reach for is my Iphone to check on emails and tweets that may have happened throughout the night. I then head downstairs and get ready for the workday so I don’t wake the wife and Daniel (They are not morning people). Once ready I check my phone again as I am about to leave Wi-Fi access for at least a 30 minute drive. I live in Madison, NC and work in Greensboro. My drive depends heavily on traffic and weather, leaving at 5:30 or 6:00AM normally get’s me to work in about 30 minutes.

Once I arrive at work I grab for a MT. Dew and unlock my machine… I never reboot my machine unless there are windows updates so it is always ready to go and set to where I left off the day before. My programs that are running upon startup normally consist of Chrome, Tweetdeck, Outlook, Flash, and Visual Studio… depending on my work the day before I may have SQL or a spreadsheet open.

Again I check email and twitter to see if anything has gone on during my drive that I need to react to. I then check my task list which is a SharePoint calendar with some extra columns for priority, comments, and requestor to see what task I need to work on next. I switch between my task list and my dry-erase board depending on my workload as I have found under heavy loads the dry-erase board made me more productive. I normally use my task list however. Having just checked my task list I can see that I have 11 High’s for both external and internal development so I jump on one and start coding.

Since I work in MarComm and not IT I find that sometimes respect as a true developer is hard to come by and I am new to the group so I still have yet to earn some of the respect. However this affects how I have to approach certain tasks and can sometimes either help or hinder a situation. I have to be very careful to put on the bully face when needed but also have to be uber-friendly which I inherently am anyway.

So while coding I will normally have to attend around 2 meetings per day sometimes this is a waste and I continue to code on my Ipone but other times I find the meetings enlightening especially the ones that decide who owns what or who controls what process.

So enough of the ambiguitis stuff and onto the meat. When I say coding I normally am required to design, build, or correct errors in XSLT/XML, SQL/VB, SQL/C#, Flash, or Java. The changes can range from making a color change to full-blown design of new collections of data. I find myself working most in SQL/VB and XML/XSLT as that is what my predecessor chose to use. I am a C# guy myself as I started programming in C and then moved into Cocoa on the Mac before becoming a web-dev.

My current biggest project is the addition of video at work both internal and external. So my Flash skills have come into play there. I hope to write up so good material for deployment in an enterprise and even develop some best practices for video.

However what gets me the most praise at work is my ability to solve problems, not always solving coding problems but by taking a look at the whole picture and be able to develop a system that works for the environment it is in. I find it odd when I solve a problem and they say no one else has thought of that… it’s so simple. I love it.

I leave my work around 4 each day but most times I don’t actually get to leave until about 5 as I get caught up in a project and don’t know when to quite or something breaks last minute in the day. Either way I reverse my morning routing where I check my Iphone when I leave and when I get home. I then try and spend time with Daniel and wife until around 9 when it is time for me and Daniel to watch some youtube and go to sleep.

So that is what I do as a web-dev, I code, I listen, and I fix problems. What a better way to work than that. I really feal that I am doing what makes me happy as I can’t get enough of it. Right now I am at home on a friday night writing this post about work when I should be asleep… What can I say I am a true G33K and there is no place like 127.0.0.1

Goodnight
David Bates