Hey, inno? Where's the funny?

Hopefully I'll get back to normal soon.  But today ain't the day.  Mucho back pain and sore fingers from ripping out waterlogged carpet.  The flood was pretty damaging.  It only got a couple inches inside the store, but the whole place now smells like a hardboiled diaperload.

Oh yeah, and the computer...

Yesterday I fired it up.  OK, I fired it up AFTER I hooked it to a new surge protector.  The dirty water in the old surge protector seemed to be causing a bit of a problem.  It booted!  Yay!  That's about all it did.  Got to the desktop and just sat there.  Well, I could move the mouse pointer around but that got old pretty quickly.  Rebooted.  Got to the desktop a little quicker.  Tried to launch the CD burning software.  Hang.  Reboot.  Could hear the tick-tick-tick of a struggling hard drive.  Must've been a ton of read errors, 'cuz it took about 10 minutes to get to the desktop.  Another 20 minutes or so for the burning app to launch.  Finally was able to get an up-to-date copy of all the junk created since the last backup.  Rebooted again for the heck of it.  Everything started to work normally.  Woooo!  Check email, print, browse the web.  Heck, even QuickBooks worked normally, and the company .qbf file is like 300+ megs!

Today?

UNABLE TO FIND BOOTABLE DEVICE.  PRESS F2 TO ENTER SETUP

Ratfart!  Took the hard drive to the shop, they confirmed it wouldn't even spin.  New HD time.  Oh, the joy of setting up Windows again... and re-installing all the drivers... and re-installing all the applications...  and restoring all the data...  Note to self:  when the moron at the PC shop puts the little Windows sticker (with the serial number) on the bottom of the PC case where it'll GET FREAKIN' WET AND UNREADABLE AFTER A FLOOD, write that number down somewhere and store it somewhere where it can't GET FREAKIN' WET AND UNREADABLE AFTER A FLOOD.  (Or, just put the PC on a high shelf when there is risk of flooding?.  -ed.     Hey ed, how about you just shut up?)

There was a time (like, 7 years ago) when I was *super* diligent about all this stuff.  Used to have a swappable HD *AND* a pair of drives with a RAID running so everything was perfectly cloned - two copies in the machine, plus the removable drive, which would get taken off-site.  Eventually, since we never seemed to need the backups, that ceased to be the habit. Even copying crucial things to a CD-R became uncommon.  Belated New Year's Resolutions:  1.  Make the boss-man do his backups no matter what.  2.  Don't let the boss-man set up his PC on the floor.  3a.  Find the person who installed that hard drive in the bottom-most bay.  3b.  Take that person deep-sea fishing and push him/her/it over the handrail.

Then came the carpet yanking.  Too bad it wasn't the stuff you'd put in your house that's just tacked down around the perimeter.  No, it had to be that commercial junk that is glued down solid.  Well, "solid" in the sense of "halfway unglued and all stretched out and wrinkled and muddy and smelling like a hardboiled diaperload."  Just enough glue, however, remained intact such that when the carpet came up, so did all the floor-leveling compound that was under it.  Ugh.  Did I mention that big logs of soggy carpet are kinda heavy?  Dang it Jim!  I'm an engraver, not a forklift!  Also, the particle-board junk in the toe-kick area under all the showroom displays was warping and falling apart.  And smelling like a hardboiled diaperload.  So everything is torn up.  The dumpster is overflowing and the "showroom" looks like the set of a cheesy disaster movie.

At least we don't have to re-key a ton of junk into QuickBooks, right?