Today’s Technical Disaster

Today was a day of managing disasters. My mother and father-in-law came down for a quick visit (they planned to leave before nightfall) for me to put some games on their daughters laptops among other things. I had everything laid out for a total of 30 minutes of work. When I booted up one of the laptops I noticed it only had 2GB of disk space left so I decided to do some pruning of the tem files etc. and clean it up… this turned out to be a big task as most of the information was her documents that she wanted to keep.

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

A Saturday of Sun, Sand, Strawberries, and Steak

Today was a good Saturday. When I left work on Friday I never imagined I would have a good Saturday as I thought I was going to have work all weekend. We started off the day by sleeping in until 9am and then watching some cartoons with Daniel when we had a suprise visit from my mother and father in law from Floyd, VA! They had just bought them a new car and wanted to test it coming down the mountain. We let Daniel play outside with my sisters for awhile while me and George caught up with things that had been going on.

We then went to get strawberries, a new tank for the grill, and some hamburgers. We all eat and played until about 1pm when the mountain folk had to go. Daniel was very sad afterword… Until we informed him that he would be spending the rest of the afternoon playing with his cousin Zach.

We went to my Mom’s where I had a ton of son duties to perform as Jess, my mom, and sister prepaired the house for her baby shower next weekend. We all had a great time and the boys got super nasty playing in the sand. We had steaks and salad followed by icecream. It was an awesome Saturday.

Thanks for reading
David Bates