Peaks and Valleys....

From a work productivity perspective, this has been a nightmarish week for me. As I am sure most of you reading this who are in the tech industry know, when technology goes bad it can ruin an otherwise good day. As my previous blog posts have noted, I have been having some serious machine issues. My primary laptop went south on me and I suspected it was hardware related. I did some troubleshooting and after a completely fresh reload of Vista I decided it must have been something else and that I jumped the gun. Then upside - fresh clean install of the OS and apps which always makes me feel good. That's what I thought anyway....

I also blogged about the rendering of the screencasts I was working on. When I woke this morning the laptop was frozen solid. Today is also what I call "Con Call Friday" (which is every friday btw) so I got a late start trying to figure out what was wrong. Turns out my initial hunch was correct. At least that is the best I can come up with without having sent the laptop back to the vendor. I have since reloaded the OS twice and suffered a variety of goofy errors from lockups during boot, to a few bluescreens. The latter is what really leads me to believe there is a hardware issue because I have actually seen more bluescreens today that I have in the past 2 years of running Vista - including while Vista was in beta.

It gets worse....

(This last part has nothing to do with work but bolsters the whole "when it rains it pours" theory.)

This silver lining in all of this is that my eldest daughter is in town. She just makes me smile. When I determined I was not going to get the laptop up and running and screencasts re-rendered without pulling all of my hair out, I decided to call it a day and spend some quality time with the daughter. She is visting from out of state and wanted check out the Microsoft Museum, do some shopping, and check out a local art fair. We hit the museum first and afterwards, went back to the car that.....would not start. This is the same car that got stuck in park two weeks ago in a downtown Seatttle parking garage. Fortunately, I kept my cool, waited a few minutes and it magically started up for us. We decided to chance to and go shopping and afterwards....same problem. This time we burned up about an hour before managing to get it running.

I am sure that none of this really matters to anyone reading, but sometimes it feels good to just vent a little.

But again, the silver lining is that my daughter is in town and I have had a great time with her. We saw some sites, did some Letterboxing (www.atlasquest.com) and spent a lot of time talking about life. She also helped me finish Guitare Hero 3 in Co-Op mode! Tomorrow we are going to Hempfest Seattle (www.hempfest.org) and tomorrow night we are going to do some karaoke. She has never seen me sing before outside of acting silly while driving our around the house, so it will be a treat to have her see me actually try to sing well to impress a crowd for a change.

btw.....I still have the raw screencast footage which I will continue working on post-weekend. I need a break from the hardware issues and have one final day to spend with the kiddo before she heads back to Texas and school.

 

Cheers!