One more day of work and then the road gets Wednesday. I’m looking more and more forward to getting out of town for a while, and to seeing my folks’ new place. Work is at this “apex” right now, an important phase in our project (they always seem to line up with big holidays), and things are crazy. I’m supposed to have the week after Christmas off, but I think I’ll be in a “checking in” mode with work since things are so hectic. Y’know, not quite a 40hr week, but not quite a vacation either. That’s fine, I don’t care. Then I’ll be “working from home,” or “WFH” as we abbreviate it on the whiteboards outside our cubes, the week Sharaun has her knee surgery… so for a while here work will be somewhat non-standard.
Nerd-talk coming up…
Well guys, something hosed my XP install, and my home system was trashed last night (tonight, as I write). It started out innocent enough, I noticed IE was displaying some fonts kinda funkily. Then my desktop icons started changing into icons for stuff that they weren’t… and I couldn’t run “regedit.” Then things slowed down, a buttload of files were missing from the c:\windows and c:\windows\inf directories… I couldn’t repair anything… something was wrooong. I assumed it was a product of installing Linux as a dual-boot, but it turns out that restoring my hard drive (pre-SuSE) resulted in the same problems. So, I reinstalled SP2… but that only seemed to make things worse. Tried to run Recovery Console, but that wouldn’t even launch. So, I reverted back to my last good backup… from sometime in early October. Yes, it was a catastrophic failure, but I’m back up and running and typing this on my dead-an-hour-ago PC, hooray for backups.
So… no Linux. Owell, I couldn’t get the sound working, and SuSE wouldn’t recognize my RAID array. On the plus side, I got to give my backup solution of choice a true test-run; and I’m happy to say it flawlessly restored my hard drive to it’s pre-Linux state. So that’s it. I think this is my last try, honestly. I’m gonna break down and buy Windows XP Pro and go with all freeware apps. Speaking of, I’m way excited for the impending new version of OpenOffice, and the newly released GIMP2.2 (dang I’m a nerd). As for my Windows problems, I don’t know what caused them. It wasn’t Linux… because my pre-Linux backup captured the problems. The only other thing I did was install, and subsequently uninstall, Firefox. It’s the only thing I can figure. Owell.
/end nerd-talk
Today Anthony and Ben and I decided to take our laptops down to the cafeteria and work. When they suggested the idea to me, I agreed immediately, writing “working from cafe, where I can see the sky” on that whiteboard outside my cube, the one we already talked about, remember? Actually, I got a lot done down there… away from the phone and and self-made interruptions.
I saw on a couple pages yesterday that Wal Mart will be offering a low-end cheap laptop that comes pre-installed with the Linspire OS. For $500, this thing reeks of a buy-it-and-install-pirated-XP strategy – which is I’m sure what many will do with the machine.
Sorry the entry was so techy today. Goodnight.
Also written on this day...
- the wind is refreshing - 2011
- BPAs, PFOAs, and PVCs - 2010
- amble at an easy pace - 2009
- time again - 2005