Ole Switcheroo

Yesterday I was just sitting around typing on IRC and basking in the glow of my 1247 career points round (double distinguished combat pins and two silver badges) when my computer completely froze up. This was rather odd, but no big deal. Unfortunately upon reboot, I was told that there was an Error Loading OS. I waited a bit and tried again with the same results. Uh oh, sounds like hard drive problems…

I tried searching for a way to diagnose if the main SATA drive had gone bad, but apparently booting from a USB drive doesn’t work that well and I didn’t have any floppies. When I booted from my Vista CD, it found no installation of the OS and said I did not have proper partitions. This I found odd, since my IDE backup HD and my SATA main HD only have one partition each. I also found it strange that when I went to the menu to look for some drivers to load, I still saw both my hard drives available. Even stranger was the fact that their letter designations were reversed, and the IDE was the C: drive while the SATA was the D: drive. Hmmmm…

As I suspected, somehow the BIOS options had changed themselves to try and boot the IDE drive first. I had seen a few things online about Vista doing odd things with the boot order, but after I set the BIOS options to boot the SATA hard drive first I had no problems rebooting. I wonder if this is from the recent pushing of Vista SP1, since I know SP1 changed some of my other computer settings, but it seems odd that the OS can alter your BIOS like that. I ran CHKDSK last night on the SATA, and it fixed some orphaned files, so hopefully my Seagate drive is OK (considering it is only about a year old).

Weak Sauce

I like applesauce, especially fine textured applesauce. While at Trader Joe’s the other day, I was sorely tempted by two varieties of fruit sauce I had not tasted before. I impulsively snapped up a jar of pearsauce and a jar of spiced chunky applesauce. This was a mistake, and now I know that I do not like chunky applesauce or pearsauce.

The texture of the pearsauce was horrible. Pears have that sorta hard grainy texture near the core and this does not mix well with the somewhat gooey nature of the outer parts of the pear. I think the texture was the main thing that drove me away, although I didn’t like the overly sweet taste either. The chunky applesauce was not quite as bad, but I realized I don’t like having big chunks of apple in my applesauce. The chunks are typically not as sweet as the rest of the applesauce which is a bit off-putting. Bunky suggested that the applesauce would have been better with a meal. I think she could be right, but I still didn’t like the chunky applesauce.

Wordpress 2.5 RC1

Took the time to try out WP 2.5 RC1 on this blog. I probably won’t update SSAB until I’m sure that this version is stable. I don’t run as many plugins on this site, and everything seems to be working so far. The one thing bothering me so far is how the categories section has been moved to the bottom.

Mach 6

Processor cores are the new razor blades.