I had yet another hard drive crash. This is becoming a habit. It doesn’t matter which dies…the one with all your graphics programs, you gotta reinstall them all; your main hard drive…you gotta reinstall them all :p But yeah, the main was worse because I couldn’t boot up to get to any of the data on my secondary drive, like my blog password which I made so long and tricky I can’t remember it.

My old computer I had reformatted my main drive and then pretty well did nothing with it so talk about starting from scratch. I think it is in my future to add these important files to both computers. Especially with the luck I’m having with drives lately.

I do not have the software reinstalled yet for the classes I’m taking so guess I’m getting behind right from the start. Got my ftp program up and managed to restore my email so it wasn’t all lost.

I was having some confusion after reinstalling Firefox today after it freaked out on me. It kept telling me it was using Flash player 9 something when I had updated and installed to the latest one. So I couldn’t figure out where it was even coming up with Version 9 and I also had some confusion about different versions for different browsers?

From what I can figure IE and whatever browsers that are similiar use active X controls where Opera and Firefox do it as a plugin. No where on Adobes site can I find anything explaining this, however when I went to download the flash player in IE, it offered me options it didn’t in Firefox, like for which browser. So I downloaded both. Uninstalled the previous version using Adobes uninstaller because that seems to be the only way that works.

Where did I learn all this from? I’m glad someone is on the ball here. Go read these three articles at cnet: A heads-up on Abobe Flash Player, Black-eyes for Adobe and Time to update Flash player. Here’s how. Then I went to Secunia Scan like he recommended and found out that my Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Bridge, Adobe Contribute, and the recently installed Adobe Air were all using outdated versions. Yeah, I guess I should get around to those upgrades, huh? I don’t use Flash through those except Adobe Air for my Tweetdeck. But it also found other things that needed updating like my Java, so it’s worth the scan.

I’m happy to say my Flash appears to be using the latest version everywhere now. What a hassle, I’m not believing there isn’t more information about this out there.

Okay, my hard drive crashed and burned. I suppose I should be glad it wasn’t my boot drive but I’d have preferred that since this one had ALL my graphics programs, all my pictures, everything important to me on it. Gah, I had a warning when a couple times I got the “this drive is not formatted, would you like to format now?” message but it always straightened up. Then there was the error a few weeks ago that had literally thousands of file errors, most in my Bryce mats. I ran chkdsk and it fixed it and from what I could see, my Bryce suffered no ill effects. I had a premonition and actually copied my LVS pdfs elsewhere and was working on doing the same with the rest. So, looks like I might not be getting at my Illustrator class too quick.

I think it would be worth it to me to pay for data recovery. I read that putting it in the freezer might make it work but I don’t think mine is a mechanical failure. There were no strange noises or any clue that something was seriously wrong (yeah, yeah, like the errors I’ve been having weren’t a clue :p). I am seriously not happy.

In my computer, I swear I do. I was playing around with a new theme and it was messing my widgets up badly, so I deleted a bunch of them. But could I get Firefox to see they were deleted? Hell no! Clear private data, nope, doesn’t work. Close Firefox and run CCleaner, nope, it is still finding some bloody version that should not exist anywhere anymore! If that’s not weird enough, then I run IE which I never run and it too is loading the page with all those deleted widgets! There’s no way that was in any IE cache which, duh, was deleted with CCleaner anyway! I liked that new theme and spent all those hours working on it and it just is whacked and man, I would love to know why. I am seriously grumpy now. It’s a complete waste of time trying to update the code to make things work when my stupid browsers won’t see what’s updated!

Not aliens but Internet Explorer. Luckily I didn’t have much on this one yet. Still, I stupidly forgot to backup my email and bookmarks and save them elsewhere first. I hope the Christmas present I ordered for my daughter comes since I’m not sure I can even find the website again.

Back a while ago when I was offline from Comcast and tried repairing my windows, it wouldn’t even let me log onto my computer because I was not online to activate windows! That is just plain bad management.

This is a new computer. As in a year ago on my birthday I bought all the parts at Newegg to build myself a great graphics computer that will last me forever (it’s going to have to). Unfortunately I apparently had no idea how to build it, so it sat here for over a year. I finally took it to a place in town and said just get it to boot. That was pretty cheap and I came home and installed everything. Other than that one validation glitch we were working like a charm. But I hadn’t gotten around to installing a lot of my graphics programs yet. So a couple of days ago I tried installing one of them and I got the message that I must close Internet Explorer first. What!?!? I don’t even use Internet Explorer but sure enough there it was in my processes. Simple enough, I terminate it. But wait! It pops right back up again. I decide to delete the darn thing. Oh carp, do you know if you have sp3 installed on Win XP you cannot delete Internet Explorer?

I head to Google and spend hours trying to find out what is calling it and forcing it to run, with no luck. I tried renaming it, nope, it just makes it all over again. So I did what any sane person would do, I reformated my drive. Now I have Windows reinstalled, my programs reinstalled and I am NOT going to update to sp3! If that makes security a problem on my computer, have at it.

Now if I can just find out how to make all those idiot speech balloons go away on my desktop and start menu. I did several solutions I found online but I am still getting some. Plus there’s that annoying messenger that won’t die no matter what I do. I told it not to load, I have the service disabled (which ought to be enough by itself), but no, every time I open my email program there it is. I think I am going to try deleting it, but I won’t be surprised if that’s not allowed either.

I don’t mind Microsoft making a program that even the ignorant masses can use but come on, give the rest of us a break!

My 300gb dive with all my graphics programs on it has been defragging for almost a week now. It sat at 94% all day yesterday and so far all day today. Okay, it was a mess, and it’s almost full, but I’m going through withdrawal symptoms here! A few months ago I started cleaning lots of junk off to defrag, only after I spent days cleaning the bugger I forgot to do the defrag :p Welcome to my world.

That makes me think of when I had ECT a few years ago. Yeah, shock therapy. It’s the only thing that zapped me out of the hell my mind was stuck in. A minor side effect is that I pretty well remember nothing about that hospital stay. I don’t remember that I couldn’t figure out how to play Go Fish with my kids. I don’t remember the night when I was let out to stand in the cold and smoke a cigarette. I decided I was ready to leave that night apparently and walked to a Quality Dairy store, called my daughter at her boyfriends house (how’d I even know that number?) and told her to come get me. I don’t remember her saying no, me walking back to the hospital and spending the next three days in the lockup side. I’m pretty sure I don’t mind forgetting that part. That’s where the really whacked out people were. My kids made me a t-shirt afterwards that says “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Not even me.” It’s pretty funny in hindsight, but mostly my memories from that time are about the hopelessness. And the guilt. Maybe I’ll talk about that part someday.