Well well well well well! The past 2 weeks have been a wild ride; things that have impeded my moral and work flow. Honestly, moral has gone up since, but it has been a stressful period of time. Where to begin…. Oh! I know! Halloween!
On the night of Halloween I got to hang out with some old friends, we had a small gathering at one of our friends apartments and we caught up. It was lovely, as I still had homework to work I was utilizing my laptop to do stuff while I hung out. You know, typical college kid things. Once I had finished my homework, I had started to update my computer because it had been quite some time. Take a wild guess where this is going. Because my computer nerd ass had two different operating systems install on the computer, and I had installed them on the same hard drive, I was able to boot between them. So, I updated windows first; then I updated my other operating system. Now with computer hard drives whenever you want to be able to use lets say, windows, you have to boot into windows. The way you boot into windows is by this thing called a “bootloader”, real apt description because it is the thing that loads the booting of windows. We love bootloaders, they are phenomenally simple things. So, a bootloader is stored as like the first thing that would be read by a computer. If your computer hard drive was a book, the bootloader is the title page and table of contents. Now, because of the way computers work, error checking at the bootloader level doesn’t really happen. The computer when turns on, assumes that whatever is contained in the bootloader page of the hard drive is perfectly correct and that there are no mistakes; it simply reads it and does literally whatever the bootloader says. If a computer can’t read a bootloader, then it doesn’t boot. It shrugs its shoulders and says “IDK, please plug in bootable media dude”. Usually, whenever you are doing updates they don’t touch the bootloader at all. In this instance, the bootloader got fondled and messed everything up. Basically, if you mess with the bootloader you mess with everything; you can no longer access any files on the hard drive and you have to data mine to get them back. Which is a whole other ordeal. Basically, windows updated, it said all good. I booted into the other operating system, and went to update it. Because the 2 operating systems where on the same drive and were separated digitally and not physically, whenever the update for the other operating system processed it didn’t think to check on whether it was on a virtually separated or physically separated disk, because why would it? Sometimes, I forget that my jerry rigged solutions often aren’t accounted for by others. In this case, the second operating system messed everything up because it told the computer to write a new updated bootloader as the first page of the hard drive. It used a “smart” reference instead of a reference that would detect that it needed to write the bootloader to a different place, because why would anyone make a computer dual boot with only one hard drive. Yeah, well I would. Anyways, it writes its bootloader on top of the windows bootloader. Then proceeds to restart and process the rest of the updates. So, guess who’s computer didn’t reboot into anything upon a restart. This guy! So, windows and Linux had a disagreement about the bootloader, and I could no longer boot into anything and its Halloween night. Normally, I wouldn’t mind. Weirdly enough, I always plan for the event of nuking my laptop if needed or if it nukes itself on accident. In this instance, I did mind. My research that I have been working on, well lets just say wasn’t backed up properly. I usually am fairly good with backing my stuff up, but I had forgotten to back stuff up for like 10 or 12 days. So, I effectively lost all my research on Halloween night. Wooo! I decided not to freak out about it, and I went home and went to bed.
On Tuesday (oh yeah that last paragraph was all just Monday haha) I went to class then to work, I started data mining my hard drive to get my files back because I am a hacker man hahahaha, then all of the sudden the hard drive had a readable piece of code stored on it that was able to run once I had cleared other stuff off of it, and that runnable piece of code set the entirety of all the bits on my hard drive from a random assortment of 1’s and 0’s to just 0’s! An event, that is nearly impossible to recover from. So, I gave up that day. I was so sad and stressed and I hadn’t taken my meds that I left work early and curled up in bed for the rest of the day.
On Wednesday I figured that I would begin work on reconstructing my data until I realized I had a test on Thursday morning, so I spent the day hanging out with friends and studying for my exam.
Thursday morning rolls around, I feel good about the test. I don’t care to make 100’s but I like make 85’s, I was in the test and estimated that I would be making between an 84 and an 87. I was happy with that, I left the test ok. Went to work and started rebuilding my research. Anyways, 7 hours later and at least 10,000 calculations all done by hand and suddenly my research is back to where I was. I had to recreate a bunch of data using complex math, but it was fun and good in the end.
That Friday, I worked on stuff and went to go look at buying a new vehicle. My mechanic friend was in town, came and looked at the vehicle and saved me $8,000 if not $13,000. The vehicle apparently was a high mark up lemon, and well that really took my emotional energy. We had a big storm that night, me and my roommate hung out in the living room while we both got numerous texts from family and friends telling us to shelter in place. We were going to go in the bathroom but it was too far away and we liked our chances on the couches in the middle of the living room that was away from most all windows. We discussed many things that night, we also discussed that it might be slightly concerning that our immediate response to bad weather events was indifference. We shrugged it off though, and once the tornado watch for our area had been “lifted” we watched Neon Genesis Evangelion. Then we did the same thing on Saturday, then we watch the movie for the show on Sunday. Then we played Halo Reach on Sunday. Basically I took the weekend off, which was definitely much needed.
This week has just kind of been a blur, I worked on a bunch of homework this week and a studying. Its been fairly normal this week, I just am now be able to sit down and write. The past few days have been a little bit of a blur.
I guess, all in all, sometimes the systems we hope to have built in our lives can be overrun; something must always give. So I haven’t been on top of anything media related this past 2 weeks at all. Well, hopefully stuff has slowed down enough and I’ve gotten to the point where I can get back to it once again. Who knows! I do need to buy a car sometime soon, but there’s only so much time in a day. One of the cars I saw recently was a Ford Focus, and honestly it would be funny to buy one purely so I can see “Hocus locus, girl get in my focus” whenever I pick people up. That would be incredibly funny to me haha.
Anyways, thank you for reading! I need to go work on more stuff, please feel free to read my other writings and things!
-Ben