Natural Order Development

What a funny story. (warning spoiler ahead) I mucked it up but good.

Ever totally destroy your boot record on an XP box? How about blowing up both your MBR and GRUB on a dual boot system. Where here I sit. Although I have a current and complete backup of all my data, it has been some time since I took an image of the disk with the software installed just as I like it. Lets face it, the box was turned to happiness, everything was installed and cleaned up and it was a perfect time to take a backup image of the laptop that could. In fact I was thinking about doing that over the holiday break.

Instead I looked at the box and got to wondering why I only had 1GB of disk space left on the laptop I explicitly bought cause it had a much larger disk then the other version of the same that had a docking station potential. That is when I discovered that I had started a dual boot experiment with the thing just before i left my previous job (which was in process of moving to an all SUSE desktop and server style).

So what happened? Well it went like this: Hmm... haven't booted to suse in over 2 years. still boots, hmm... what was the passwords... hmm.... hey nothing here at all... don't need this 2 year old SUSE partition at all ... boot back to Windows XP, open up the disk manager, delete the SUSE partition, reallocate it as a windows partition, format it, fix the driver letter assignments. Cool! Now I have a nice 80GB of "data" space / backup storage. Lets organize a bit. Move this over here, move that over there, rearrange this stuff. Wow this is nice. Whoops its 1 AM time for bed. Shutdown. ... next day ... boot ... What do you mean you don't have a bootable device? Crap ... grub was on the second partition? OK fine no problem C: was bootable before I went dual boot. So where did I stuff that XP install DVD? Ah yes Windows XP Install Disk, boot to CD, wait for it, repair console, login to C:, run fixmbr on C:, done. Solid! That should fix it. ... reboot ... What do you mean you don't have a bootable device? Crap ... Lets see, XP Install Disk, boot to CD, repair console, login to C:, run fixboot on C:, done. Solid! That should fix it. ... reboot ... what do you mean you don't have a bootable device? Crap!! Hmm... I have Partition Magic somewhere and I think it can do something about this ... ah heck, where did I put it? ... More to come.

This weekend turned out completely backwards.

Question: What happens when you throw a party and no one shows up?

Answer: You have a completely different party!

I had 30 friends swear they were coming to the free karaoke party I was roped into helping with Friday night. They even went so far as to tell me a day or so before hand how much they were looking forward to going AND that they had a couple friends that were coming too. So I figured at least 10 would show up. ;^)

The other people putting on the party also called around and we had confirmed about 60 people. We made sure there was enough food for about 40 figuring we could order pizzas if there wasn't enough.

Grand total of 16 people came... Which even with all the free booze was not enough to really do karaoke... So I reprogrammed the machine tossed in a bunch of 80s music, dragged out the poker table and we played poker to loud 80s music with TONS of booze, snacks, and deserts. Everyone had a hell of a good time. Lots of people were sent home with enough left overs to eat for a week.

After the poker game broke up at about 10 PM three of us headed out to the pool hall and played pool till 2 AM.

Friday night - not what I expected but fun none-the-less

What does this have to do with anything? Think about it. There is a lesson in there.