Im only half as wise as I were yesterday…

I had to tell my day job employer last week, that he should expect me to be only half as wise from this Wednesday and in all future.

Obviously that got some attention. The potential issues with employing a previously “full wit” but now halfwit, who expect no change in the salary, the potential issues with the planned applications to be made… do we now requite an additional halfwit to solve the same amount of work, or can the current halfwit work double shifts to make up for the loss of wisdom?

Actually the day was less than perfect.. and the night worse. It was one of those days that you just want to forget about as soon as possible.

So what is it all about?

Well… I’m nearing 50 years old, and all my years, I have had my good looks (according to myself), my healthy teeth s, and all of my wisdom that my 4 wisdom teeth s provide me with.

Then on one Wednesday I visited my dentist, and in absolutely no time, my wisdom was half ed. He pulled my two top dear and beloved wisdom teeth s, that has followed me for better and worse, without asking for much!

That was the beginning of a bad day.

We have a saying here in Denmark… bad things happens in streams. So obviously more had to happen.

Back at the office again, with a whole days of planned coding work in front of me, a bottle of coke zero ready, and the keyboard just waiting with excitement for my gentle touch, I decided to start with rescuing an ailing gaming laptop which is used for some specialized programming, but which motherboard is starting to make problems and refusing to start unless retried many times. I wanted to virtualize it using VMWare to my main development machine and then move it to some NAS drives.

Logging in, Microsoft told me that there were some updates for me, and VMWare also wanted to do some minor updates. Since my computers mostly run 24×7, and only fairly rarely are rebooted, I decided… ok.. let the update happen.

So reboot and update…. and reboot again….. and waiting… and waiting… and waiting…. while my blood pressure began to rise alarmingly for someone who couldn’t control his lips and who was drooling like a newborn baby. due to the anesthetic, but being a patriot, of course in the  Danish national colors… mostly red… and some white.

On top of it all, I of some reason has become allergic in the middle of everything… so my nose was playing catch with my mouth… about which one could produce most uncontrolled and unwanted fluids.

So sniffing, cursing and damning everything Microsoft, I sat there and waited and waited… until at some point I decided… it should have booted by now. But alas only a spinning wheel, which indicates that it is working on something. I know what it was working on… to make my day worse!

Ok… annoying… but relax maestro… you are the champ…. the computer champ. You can easily fix this little issue. That thought was the first sign of my lost wisdom.

Reboot… ….. ….. …….. ok.. that didn’t work.

Reset while rebooting…… Ahh… there is the nice advanced startup menu…. it has all sorts of tools to make my life easier and my computer work.

Lets first let it attempt to repair my startup problems.

Reboot….. Checking disk….. 1 hour later… done checking disk. No problems…. MS: “I think I have fixed your startup problem…. please try to reboot”… so… Reboot……waiting… waiting… waiting…. …. …. Argh… still not working.

Ok.. reboot twice with reset in between to access the advanced startup menu again. Next step… Start in safe mode…..Reboot…. Waiting… waiting… waiting………:ARRRGHHH.

And so my night continued. Then enabled boot log files to see what was causing the problem. Then spend countless of hours analyzing the situation. I didn’t really want to reinstall Windows from scratch again… it would take days to get all reinstalled again. Remember I have some 10-12 development environments and versions installed on it.

In late evening I started to panic… Ok… Ill go to the nearest open hypermarket and buy a new computer. Browsing what was available… and decided not to. If to buy something I like to buy something substantially better… not just more of the same… and basically… doing that would absolutely hurt my computer champ pride.

Then it was late dinner time, and it was my turn to put the plates on the table and serve the food made by my wife. Obviously one shouldn’t give such an amount of responsibility to someone like me, that was influenced in more than one way.

That resulted in loss of china. Dropped on the tile floor.

What I did get more wise about, was that mood do not improve in such situations. I learned that the hard way.

After dinner and cleaning up and trying to forget about it all for just a moment, back on death row with my stubborn computer.

Going thru all well meaning guides about the topic on the internet, and waiting… wai…wa… w…. zzzzzz…. F…. is it still not working!!!!

I gave up. I decided to reinstall Windows by issuing a fresh install, but keeping my so called “personal files”. I was worrying about the not so personal files more!

Whoaa… it has installed… let it …. Reboot!…… and waiting….waiting…. F.. F… SAKE!

It STILL DO NOT get past the spinning wheel!

To wrap the story up, I ended ripping the SSD drive from an external casing, and installing it into the computer, reinstalling a completely fresh Windows, hoping that tools like Laplink PCmover would make my life less miserable afterwards by moving applications over from my 2TB half full disk…to my….ehh…. that is gonna be a tight fit…. 256GB  SSD drive.

Darned… it was not going to be able to work the night (well now it was morning) over. I need a bigger disk to restore to.

And that is just about where I am right now. A 4TB disk richer, but probably around 10 years older and with only half my wisdom left.

So dear Components4Developer friends, dear Danvægt friends and dear family… please bear with me!

🙂