I definitely made the right decision on Monday when I chose not to go to Austin with a broken computer. Many things happened at work this week which I needed to tend to fairly quickly, and I wouldn’t have been able to do them without a computer. Here, I had the option of using my other office computer or my home computer; in Austin, I would have been SOL. True, I would have been a lot more effective in my meeting if I’d been there in person instead of on the phone, but there were several others calling in, so it wasn’t too bad — it’s a different story when I’m the only one on the phone and there are ten people in the room.

On Tuesday, I turned my machine over to deskside support here. They weren’t able to get Win2K to be stable, but they were able to reinstall it on top of itself and then back up all of my data to the LAN (something I’d been derelict in doing — fortunately, most everything valuable was replicated elsewhere anyway). Then they blew away the system and did a complete reinstall.

The bad news, though, was that the reinstall they did wasn’t of a clean system; it was of our customized, locked-down, and modified system. For a lot of people, having that pre-customized system is a Good Thing; it saves a lot of time if you can live within its limits. I can’t (though it might be more honest to say, “I won’t”).

So I went back to the recovery CD that came with my computer in the first place and loaded up a vanilla Win2K system. And now I’m going through Windows Update to bring it up to current service levels. I’m on my fourth reboot so far, with at least one or two yet to come.

And then I have to install my applications. And recover my data from the LAN. And convert the filesystem from FAT32 to NTFS. And probably about the time I get all of that finished, I’ll either get a copy of XP or a new computer and can start the process again.

Ahh, productivity….

But enough about work

Tomorrow, we’ll be getting up early to go see Harry Potter; the IBM Club arranged a 9am showing at a theatre at the Great Mall in Milpitas, and we grabbed tickets. I’m looking forward to seeing the movie, and we might even do some shopping afterwards before the malls become entirely intolerable.

It’s also Shir Hadash‘s annual Scholar-in-Residence weekend; this year, we have Cantor Peri Smilow, who will be delivering a sermon in song at tonight’s services.

And sometime this weekend, we’ll watch Iron Chef USA. The Merc’s reviewer didn’t particularly like it, but we’re gonna watch anyway.

Shabbat Shalom!

Right about now, I should be on an airplane on its way to Austin. But I’m not; I’m at home.

The first thing I heard this morning when the clock radio turned itself on was a sentence something like this: “and we’ll have more about the crash of American Flight 587 soon”. I’d already turned off the radio by the time my brain processed the sentence, and I didn’t want to turn it on again.

I had to be at home today; it was supposed to have been a vacation day, since Jeffrey didn’t have school, but that was before I got scheduled to travel. And before the skies opened, making it feel like a good day to stay home. So I spent the day looking at news web sites (I didn’t want to turn on the TV) and trying to decide whether or not to go on the trip.

I finally decided that, yes, I would go — all of the news reports indicated that the crash was “just” a mechanical, not terrorism, and so it shouldn’t affect me. So Diane took me to the airport, and ten minutes after arriving, I was through security and in the Admirals’ Club.

That was probably a mistake. They had CNN on the big-screen TVs, and, even though I wasn’t sitting at that end of the club, any time I went to get some water, I saw the screen, which, of course, was always showing footage from this morning’s crash. I started to feel uneasy again.

Then I tried to load the route from Austin Airport to the hotel from my computer into my GPS. But I couldn’t — the program complained that COM1 wasn’t working. So I decided to reboot the computer, and got a bluescreen early in the bootup process. A 100%-reproducable bluescreen. Trying to boot the “last known good” configuration didn’t help. I couldn’t even get into Safe Mode.

I didn’t think being without my computer for this trip was a good idea. Instead, I decided that this was A Sign, and walked over to the desk and had them cancel my tickets. Then I called the travel agent and cancelled my hotel room, just a couple of minutes before I would have had to pay for a night anyway.

And then I came home.

I feel a little guilty about not going to my meeting, and I’m not looking forward to doing two full-day conference calls. But I just didn’t feel comfortable getting on that plane, and when my computer died, I was glad to have a somewhat logical reason to stay home.