Wow, what a terrible week. Car problems, deaths, hard drive crashes. I scanned my drive this morning and found some bad sectors which have been causing Windows to continue shutting down. It’s an old drive that my neighbor gave me years ago, so I upgraded it. I guess by defragging my drive the other day, I moved some important Windows system files into bad sectors. Right now I’m copying files over, for the second time this week. I won’t even get into the other computer issues I’ve had this afternoon/evening.

One thing that really bugs me, though, is that I HAVE a legitimate copy of Windows XP that came with this computer that refuses to work. It goes through the recovery procedure and seems like it should work, but it refuses to boot correctly. My guess is that it’s because I’ve changed around some of the hardware on the computer over the years. That’s all I can think of. The recover thing has failed to work on two different drives now. It’s forcing me into a life of piracy.

One good thing came out of this, though. I realized how incredibly valuable Hiren’s Boot CD is. Someone on the PLA Forums recommended that I download it for some laptop bios issues I was having a few months ago. This bootable CD can clone drives, repair errors, scan disks, recover passwords, and so much more. It saved me from losing a lot of data during my 2nd crash this week. A Google search will find you download links for it. I’m hoping I’ll be able to use some of the utilities on it to recover my old hard drive that crashed last year. I’ve got a lot of stuff on that one that I didn’t have backed up.

My trunk lock stopped working a few weeks ago, so my trunk hasn’t been able to lock since then. Yesterday I finally got around to removing the power locking mechanism from it. I haven’t tried to take it apart to see if I can figure out what’s wrong with it yet. But I called a place about it and they told me it’d be $80 for the part and about $120 in labor. At the very worst, I’ll just pay the $80 for the part and install it myself. $120 to put that thing in, though. And it only took me 10 minutes to remove it. Hopefully I can repair whatever the problem is myself.

Kids and I saw a couple movies this weekend. The Last Mimzy and TMNT. The Last Mimzy was great and TMNT was retarded. Both fulfilled my expectations. We were at the theater for more than 4 hours.

On Friday, as we were leaving the school, some kids were taking down the flag as usual. But this time some girl had one flag draped around her shoulders and another over her head, running away screaming as another student chased her. Another girl was sitting in the rope that was hanging from the flagpole, swinging on it. Damn kids need to learn respect for the flag! But wow, that was hilarious to see.

Jammie is finally using the domain I bought her a year ago! I feel so appreciated now!