IMPORTANT: The following journal is intended for the use and viewing of approved persons only and may contain information that is confidential, privileged or unsuitable for overly sensitive persons with low self-esteem, no sense of humour or irrational religious beliefs. Any dissemination, distribution or copying of this work is not authorised (either explicitly or implicitly) and constitutes an irritating social faux pas. Unless the word ‘absquatulation’ has been used in its correct context somewhere other than in this warning, it does not have any legal or grammatical use and may be ignored. No animals were harmed in the creation of this journal and a minimum of Microsoft software was used. Those of you with an overwhelming fear of the unknown will be gratified to learn that there is no hidden message revealed by reading this warning backwards.

Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Sunday 15 February 2004 (Day View)

Wed 11 Feb | Thu 12 Feb | Fri 13 Feb | Sat 14 Feb |   Sun 15 Feb   Mon 16 Feb | Tue 17 Feb | Wed 18 Feb | Thu 19 Feb |

15.02.2004 – Sunday 15 February – Unmountable Boot Disk

• I woke up (after one o’clock too, I should add) to find the computer with a blue screen error – unmountable boot disk. The first thing I thought, of course, was “Oh no, the hard drive has died”. I then did all the normal things, tried booting into safe mode, ran a RAM check because I’ve had problems with the RAM in this machine before, removed the secondary hard drive in case it had died and had the swap file on it or something odd, and then went to find an XP CD to run the recovery console – and couldn’t. My XP CD must be in Brisbane.
  I walked up to Shan’s to borrow an XP CD from him, but he didn’t have one either, so I had to drive out to Home Rule and borrow theirs. Only Mandi was home, the rest apparently up along the hydropower pipeline somewhere because a tree fell on it last night. After rummaging through piles of lingerie for a while, I found an XP CD – where else would you keep your CDs?
  Once I had the XP CD, I ran the recovery console. I was unable to get a directory listing – it gave some weird error, so I ran CHKDSK, which said it fixed a few errors. I was then able to get a directory listing, so I rebooted into Windows – and it worked. I did a full disk scan, with no errors, plugged the secondary hard drive back in, and connected to the internet. Apart from the modem saying it’s connected at its maximum port speed of 115.2 Kbsp, everything seems normal. I’m very glad, as I was worried the hard drive or something worse had died and I’d have to drive to town tomorrow and buy one, possibly at an exorbitant Cooktown price just so I could get online, and probably more importantly, so I could get the PC fixed and running before I left for university.
  lulu says I pinged out at six past five this morning, and Shan says his computer had rebooted, so I’m assuming there was a power failure, probably right in the middle of my computer writing a change to its file system, which corrupted it.
  Mandi also invited me over on Tuesday night for Ella’s birthday, and I noticed that there’s probably not enough fuel in the car to get to town – something of a problem seeing as I don’t have any spare fuel here and the nearest fuel is in town.

Evening

• Shan, his wife, and two sisters arrived and invited me up to watch a DVD. Unfortunately I’d just made something to eat, so they left while I ate that and discussed Australia’s laws dealing with the age of consent, and then walked up and saw “Dungeons & Dragons” at Shan’s place. I couldn’t help comparing it to “The Lord of the Rings”, as the plots are mildly similar – but the acting, direction, and realism aren’t even in the same class.

Night

• I ended up staying up all night chatting and messing around online. I found a link checker run by the W3C so figured I might as well check all the links on my site. I found a couple of broken ones, and a few that were being redirected, and fixed them.