Daily Recap for 12-3-5

I woke up uneasy to the sound of leaf-blowers directly outside of my window. It sounds oddly like a vacuum, except a million times louder. I’m a heavy sleeper, but it roused me in a stupefied state. I rolled over.

Then I heard the sound of an actual vacuum. Joy. Rolled over again.

Dad knocks on my door and tells me Gita’s on the phone with computer issues. That’s nice. I told him to go away, as I wasn’t unconscious. Rolled over.

He knocked again, saying he wanted to GOTO ShopRite. *blinks* Rolled over again.

Some time later and many “Well, maybe I can sit up now” thoughtlines later, I .. sat up. Bathrobe keeping my body heat close to me, I turned on Roxanne and went about reinstalling Windows. Joy. Gita called somewhere in this span. Her explorer.exe is causing a page fault. Translation: explorer.exe is corrupted, reinstall windows. Yawn.

I ran a utility I downloaded from Western Digital. I knew there was no way to save the data in Cargo Bay Two. Much to my dismay, I threw away the old Master File Table. Figuring I’d need to plan for the future, I gave myself a whopping four partitions this time.

Reinstalled Windows on the same partition I’ve formatted so many times with Lisa Electron. And really, for the most part, things are working normally. Sense my hesitation.

I decided I deserved to blow up some pixels. I installed DOOM3. I’ll get as far as the game menu, set up the display and shit. I’ll tell it to launch a new game, the ominous LOADING bar will come up, but never fill, and then go back to the previous screen.

DOOM3 is installed in the new Cargo Bay Two, which is the fourth partition on my second hard drive. Only thing on there. Out of morbid curiosity, I ran a chkdsk. Flew, and gave me a wonderful report. *twirls finger* I ran chkdsk with /R. It flew until it some number. I’ve seen this too many times. I could have let it go, but smited it.

I’m currently running chkdsk with /R /I /C. It stalled at 76%, but then got over itself in a few minutes. I’ve never seen it get to stage five with the /R so far. My instincts are that there’s some corrupted area of the hard drive itself. Strange. I knew I should have done a hour-long format of the partition. Frankly, I’m not even sure what that does. Does it reset the bits to 0 or 1? *shrugs*

Oooh boy. It’s verifying free space. Still sitting at 0 percent. I’ll be very surprised if this finishes. I really need to find some utility that does hard drive shit. I feel like cnet isn’t as good as it used to be.

After booting windows, I did a long format of Engineering and Auxilery Systems. Yes, my penchant for my Star Trek naming convention hasn’t ceased. My dad knocked and again asked if I wanted to go grocery shopping with him. Reminded myself that I needed the basic fixings for tacos.

Have I mentioned how my dad scares me with his driving? You should hear my inner monologue. Hell, you should see some of the dreams I’ve had years ago, driving off a cliff. To say I don’t trust the bastard is an understatement.

I really don’t understand how my dad manages to function at all. You think my memory is bad? Actually, it’s not that bad at all. My spatial intelligence is rather extraordinary at times. I’m still slightly disorientated by the “new” layout of ShopRite, but if I’ve bought something once, I’ll always know where it is. Dad had fish sticks on his list. I knew exactly where it is, on the dot. Also on his list (that mom made for him) was those little bottles of lemon extract. My instincts were that they’re in produce. I was right.

I really wish he would maintain his lane, and signal. And not signal when there’s a bend in the road. *smacks forehead* Lost track of how many people do that.

chkdsk is still sitting at 0%, for free space verification. I think I’ll go ahead with formatting the drive when I GOTO bed.

Well, at least everything in Cargo Bay One is still fully functional. A fresh install of windows, and I can still run winamp without installing a thing. (Ditto WinZip, Nester and DoomLegacy.) WinAmp never refuses to work. If winamp doesn’t work, I’ve got major problems. : D

If I haven’t made it clear before, I suspect bad porn is the cause of my hard drive issues. In clearing the hard drive, I lost such spectacular films as “Man Academy.” …I can’t really remember names of other things, as nothing is nearly as notable as “Man Academy.” Hilarious HOTGAYSEX™.

I was smart enough to back up my image archive months ago, so that’s saved. I decided losing movies wasn’t a big deal. But if I lost my alphabetically organized ISM archive, I’d pout. Reminds me, I was going to do the same kind of organization to my growing abbywinters archive.

Ahem.

Still sitting at 0%.

If there’s a damaged portion of the physical drive, isn’t there a way for the system to avoid read/writing from those sectors? You’d think. I remember once doing a scandisk on a floppy, just so the system would avoid reading bad sectors. I’m a weirdo.

Partitions have saved my sanity. Since I bought that hard drive nearly four years ago (post hard drive crash), my files have remained more or less intact, despite nearly a dozen reinstallations of windows.

What will be interesting is trying to preserve my existing Sims game. I have to remember to rename sims to sims2, then install Sims like I normally would, then copy sims2 to sims, overwriting everything and hope it works. If only I knew how to write the registry values myself. Sims and all the expansion packs is easily one of the most daunting installations to do. I’ll save that for another day, when I’m sure I won’t need to reinstall windows.

Still sitting at 0%.

I need to pee.

Having given myself the day off from everything, I’ll be fresh for beginning tomorrow’s benchmarking. No overexertion, just annotating the weights and reps. I think I’ll start using the more difficult chest press machine rather than the incline bench press, so I can track my progress easier. Me excited?

Bleh. I need to find something else to do with myself.