While deciding whether to buy or build my new PC I came across the idea of trying to breath some new life into my old craptop.  Like most of the machines in my possession, my old craptop is a barely functioning 3rd generation hand-me-down HP laptop with a burned out hard drive and an very rarely functioning DVD drive.

I ordered a new 40G HD from eBay and it arrived today so I thought I'd spend a few cycles to see if I can get this bad boy back on his feet.  So I popped in the new HD and prayed for a boot partition.  My prayers went un-answered.  So I grabbed my DSL Live CD and put it in the drive which dutifully ignored it.  So I popped it out and put it in again.  After repeating this process about 30 times I finally found the right spot to put my hands to torque the case to get the craptop to recognize the CD drive and began my prayer sequence again.  DSL almost booted up... but not quite.  Couldn't find Knoppix driver. 

As luck would have it I dug up an old 3.5" USB floppy drive and as even more luck would have it I found an old FreeDOS diskette... unfortunately FreeDOS doesn't have native support for networking... back to the drawing board.  Next step was to try and boot from my USB DVD drive... what do you know BIOS doesn't support it.  Did a little search and came across rom-o-matic which would give me a bootable floppy disk with network support.  Great, now all I have to do is find another floppy... Now I've owned 1000's of floppies over the course of my career but do you think I have another floppy left anywhere in the house?  Not a chance, and I'm too much of a coward to erase the only one I have.

The Sanford & Son Lab has 7 machines (4.5 working), 5 CD ROM drives (0 working) and 3 DVD drives (1 working).  My next option is to create a bootable USB pen drive and give that a shot, unfortunately I gave my last one to the misses.  The only other option I can come up with is boot from the network but I've never done that before and frankly don't have very high hopes. 

Looks like I need to make a lunch run to CompUSA tomorrow to pick up a few new pen drives... I will not be denied my craptop! 

TTFN

My last post was over a month ago.  I went from a cushy, do-nothing gig straight back into the thick of the action.  I had spent the previous 9 months or so contracting to a big company, a stint I referred to as my sabbatical.  It was nice.  It gave me a chance to reset and reminded me that I am just not cut out for corporate America.... way too slow.

I moved onto a "start-up" which has been around for 10 years but you sure wouldn't be able to tell that from the inside.  It's the kind of place that thrive.  Un-realistic schedules, limited resources, half-crazed employees with just a touch of self-realization.  Man it's good to be home ;-}  The only downside is I got blind-sided.  I had been lulled to sleep by the pace of the fortune 100's and kinda got caught off guard on a few different fronts.  Long story short, four large projects in four weeks with four different technologies and platforms.  All of them are currently wrapping up with the finally next week with me on-site in Reno.

Now that things are starting to settle down, or more to the point I'm starting to get use to things being crazy again, I've vowed to start catching up.  I have 100s of podcasts and 1000s of blog entries to catch up on.  I'm going to be getting a new PC in the next few weeks and re-doubling my recently abandon AWS efforts.

Another result of my trial by fire is that I'm actually writing code again.  Not great code mind you, but code none the less.  That's not to say that I haven't always "written code" but the truth is the past few years have seen me doing more design and architecture work with very little hard core development.  The coding I have done has been geared almost exclusively toward solving business needs.  That is of course still the primary objective of software development (despite most developers POV) but in doing so I lost some of the initial thrill of deep, selfish problem solving that you can only get by pouring over obscure API references ;-}

As a result of my current transformation I hope to bend this into more of a technical blog.  Not that it will become a hard core development blog but I plan on using it to handle a bit more technical step-by-step material.  And I promise to try and post more often than once a month ;-}

TTFN