Yikes, I'm Offline

and Dumberer ?

Title reference is not to my son, who I love, but to the sequence of events in my significantly degraded (excuse for a) life.

My son accidentally knocked over my laptop and it hit the floor on the power connector, apparently jarring it bad enough that I can't get it to power on again. I automatically yelled (rare) "GO TO YOUR ROOM NOW" ! His own bedroom, that he has only been allowed to use once in 2 years. It was an accident, but careless, he was warned to settle down several times just prior to running into the laptop. My wife commented later, it should have been somewhere safer, so he couldn't knock it over. True, but he has his own account on the laptop with KidPix, I Spy, etc.

I took a couple of deep breathes (Leigh's advice), listened to see if he was playing, then opened his door, and saw him sitting quietly in his chair crying. Surely not the way either of us wanted to spend our limited time together. The next day, he just sat quietly and read one of my old comic books he found in the attic, not his usual self at all.

The whole divorce case is on that laptop, the documents are backed up from a few weeks ago, but so much is happening in the last month, that missing the most current, audited spreadsheets and settlement markup comparisons (that I needed to find my own lawyers errors) is a serious missing piece. Not to mention all the software, productivity tools, settings, etc. that I've come to live with and expect (email databases etc.).

So I take out the hard drive, connect it to my desktop, load recovery tools, boot managers, sync & compare tools. I've done this before so it wasn't total panic, but when it's personal, like this divorce case, it does increase the level of stress.

Good news, the disk is fine. Bad news, I marked my logon profile as private and even though I have the same logon profile on the desktop and it has the highest admin privileges, it still refused access. This is a new twist with XP (didn't run into this in my previous forays of disk recovery too many times for me to count).

So maybe I should just alternate boot the whole drive? Well that would have worked before Microsoft's Activation Process which keeps American's honest, but is easily circumvented overseas. I had half a mind to logon onto a cracker site and get a bogus activation code. I paid for two copies of XP and now I have only one machine and can't run the 2nd copy even if I buy a new machine, because it won't activate on anything other than my 2 year old laptop which isn't sold anymore.

So I do some research on why I can't access all the data from an Admin account. Thanks Microsoft for your consistency. Its meant to stop someone from stealing your hard drive and getting the info. But Microsoft documents in their knowledgebase exactly how to reclaim ownership of someone else's drive, even if marked Admin and Private. Of course the process is a bit of a pain in the ass and the average PC user would be stumped, but I tried it and it worked fine.

So now I have an entire image of the hard drive on my desktop, moved over the data, reinstalled some software, but now the fun part. Reconnecting settings, email data bases, encrypted password files, what a pain in the ass.

Microsoft - people ready. Yeah Lawyers are helpful too. (jqism)
What a load of shit.

So, after getting the most critical pieces working, I try logging on from my desktop and I get a connection refusal from any secure site, including all the financial sites I need to access daily for my overcomplicated divorce life and Blogger logon. The ISP support gave me the run around when they couldn't find the problem. Of course that the person barely spoke English, the voice connection apparently poor from traveling across the globe, didn't help either.

After many hours across three days, finally getting to the US head quarters technicians (an honor not granted to customers, unless they know how the inner workings of an offshored support structure work) they finally gave up, don't know why. It could have been quicker, had their support people been able to keep up with me. Of course computers have been my 30 year career, I was talking to people who just do this as a job.

That's one tiny semantic difference that has one gigantic implication. (jqism, with apologies to Neil Armstrong)

Another sign of the times, people outlive careers, they just have a string of jobs. Literally! The computer science / mainframe computing career I started in 30 years ago is nearly extinct. The industry joke is, looking for a job, you'll have better luck in the obituaries than the classifieds.

So I'm off to my own devices. The ultimate proof, install and dual boot a bare bones OS (Operating System) and attempt to connect to a secure site. If successful, run audit, compare, and sync to find the differences, then research them to find the cause. OK, gather the stuff, where the hell is my master OEM copy of Windows XP Home Edition? Crap, I can't do it. More PITA (pain in the ass)!

First I try Windows (NT) 2000 because it does not require activation, Then I try to customize the connection and remember this is based on Windows 95 technology, almost as old as our dead marriage, and equally distant in my memory, After fooling around trying to get this old OS to work, I gave up on it. OK, I have my Windows XP Pro OEM master disk, but that activation code goes with another machine. Loophole, I can run it for 30 days, under the radar, without activating it. I install it, bypass the many automatic attempts Microsoft has put in there to confound those who know what they're doing, and boot it, it works!

Great, now I get to do the reconnection crap all over again. And it's inconclusive because it is a different OS. At least it gives me 30 days to find that damn disk that goes with this machine. Rather than screwing around with this same activation process for Office, I just installed Open Office in Microsoft compatibility mode.

A lot of stuff in the works, wish I could tell you about it all.

Mediocrity is King, Excellence is old fashioned. (jqism)

What a frustrating, distraction of a week!

Online Status: Online to Web Sat 04/14 BUT
Web status update: Heavy hacker attacks on 4/15, making web use damn near impossible
Offline to Web Development Tools for my personal web spaces
Offline to all email