To Infinity....And Right Back Where I Started!

Life's a crazy thing, isn't it? You wake up one day thinking you're going to be doing A, and end up all the way at the other end of the alphabet doing Z.

Let's start with last week, because last week was a 'fun' week.

Monday - Wednesday
The previous week, you see, my Sister had come down for a visit to see the Babies (Ours and our Fathers). While she was here we had our typical business meeting about where the business is going to go, and how much longer it's going to take to get there. This is my Internet Business that you can read about in my Developer's Blog. And you can even sign up to BETA Test our games.

Only this time was different. Since being off work my father and I had laid out a six month development time line that makes our launch sometime towards the end of this year in December - a scary prospect to be sure. The problem is, there are alot of elements (Marketing, Artwork, Payment methods, etc etc) we haven't yet explored that all need to be done by then. The end result of our meeting was that we all had alot of work to do, and quickly. So starting Monday I jumped all over that and actually started developing the game, putting a firm art list together for our art team, and putting a package of some reference material together for them to look at. And recruiting a team of BETA/ALPHA testers, and building some admin tools so I could track them, and updating the developers blog - this monster has turned into a full-time job! At any rate, getting all of that aligned filled up most of my early week, so it's no surprise that I didn't get to my dad's computer until...

Thursday
Last week my dad took a business trip all the way up North to San Francisco. While he was gone his new computer arrived and I began the time honored task of moving a hard drive from one computer to the other - they're both SATA drives, one slightly older then the other, they're both SATA Mother Boards, they're both DELL PCs with fairly good components. There should be no problem, right? Plug in the new SATA, and everything is good to go.

I wish. I plugged in the new hard drive, and Win XP started to load...only to crash to the Blue Screen of Death halfway through loading...everytime I booted it up. Wow, this was a problem. But not so big, I though. I tried repairing the Win XP installation - no luck. I tried adding the new drivers for the new hard ware, no luck. At this point I was pretty frustrated, so I thought I'd move it back, set up his old computer, and figure out what to do next at a later date. So I took the drive and put it back in the older computer and booted it up.

It didn't get past the boot screen before I got so many errors I thought my brain had just crashed. And then the computer shut down.

Now this seems a good point to mention that all of my dad's business data is on this drive. It pays his bills, and since we live with him, puts a roof over our head. At this point I was starting to sweat a little. But I hadn't formatted anything, and I hadn't erased anything, so all the data still had to be there, right? Somewhere?

And then my phone rang. It was about 4:30 and my wife was going to be home from work soon, the boy was happily playing in his little entertainment seat while watching either Baby Einstein or Toy Story (Which seems to be the only animated/disney movie he loves for reasons I can't fathom). It was my dad, on the phone, wondering if I could come pick him up. "Sure!" I said. "Where are you?"

"Oh," came the reply. "About an hour outside of San Francisco."

For those of you who don't know, San Francisco is about a 6-7 hour drive from our house. But what you probably don't know is that my dad is a pretty silly guy. He likes pranks and practical jokes, and I was honestly not sure if he was serious or not. So I asked him about six times, and he said yes, he needed me to come pick up. So I waited until 5, my wife came home, and I headed to San Francisco. He actually met me a little closer, he found a tow-truck driver. My family is not shy of hotels, so the whole way up there I was burning with an intense curiosity to see why it was he had such a pressing need for me to come pick him up - I got a nasty shock when we got there. His Toyota Avalon of Eight Years was being laid to rest. Apparently and unknown oil leak had caused the engine to seize up. We took many family road trips in that car, and it served us well.

I didn't get home until 2 AM.

Friday
Data recovery on the hard drive from dawn until dusk. I started by looking for some information online, and found some good tutorials...but by that point in the day (about noon) the boy was just being too difficult for me to get anything done. I downloaded some utilities and loaded the drive to dual boot with another (good) SATA drive and started making phone calls. I HATE asking for help. It's like the bane of my existence, but I'm not above knowing that I need it sometimes, and today if dad's data was going to stand a chance, someone else needed to watch the baby.

I got a hold of my aunt, who asked my cousin to come babysit, and true to her word, showed up about an hour later and absolved me of my baby duties for the day. I only wish it had been sooner. At this point I was throughly stressed. I was hoping the data was still there, but I didn't know for sure, and I needed to find out. Fortunately, one of the programs I was using worked! I could see the data, but I still couldn't access it, and it was giving me an error every time I tried. It turns out, correcting that error restored the hard drive to it's formally bootable status. But I still got the blue screen of death trying to boot it in the new computer.

The good news was: data was intact. The bad news was: He needed a new OS installation, which of course means reinstalling ALL his old files all over again. But his data was back.

Early Friday evening, as my cousin was still there, we had agreed to have dinner with her and my dad - before I was invited to go to Game Night with the guy's for a while. It was very difficult working around the hard drive, trying to help my wife with dinner (Which ended up getting passed to my cousin anyway) and trying to get out the door to see the guys all at the same time, but we managed! And we had chicken tacos - which aren't as good as beef, but are still pretty good.

I ended up at Matt's for Game Night on Friday night, with my wife and the baby (Which is always pleasant!). There was, evidently some confusion about our plans to continue our D&D Game, because I had told them when they invited me I wasn't interested in RPing that night, so we ended up with some Battlefront to play instead. After a half hour of configuring computers, we got things all set up and played a match or two, only to drop out and re-host with different settings: 2 v2 sniper duels.

That went fairly well for the first map. I think technically we 'lost' because they captured all the spawn points, but we also 'won' because we had the most kills (I had the most kills, by three or four. Kill counts all around were fairly low - I was the only one to break 10). It was quite intense and very enjoyable, even though some of them didn't want to play initially we all had a great deal of fun on the first map.

We made a mistake switching maps on the second game, though, because we ended up on a map with vehicles (And I also discovered/remembered that I could use my remote droid to call down orbital bombardments, which basically meant I hid a few steps away from an ammo droid and ran my remote out to call down strikes of doom on the other team for the whole game). It quickly degenerated into a free-for-all but I had to call it a night and so I left some time early on...

Saturday
Saturday was both one of the easiest and longest days yet. We had to get up early - on a Saturday - to go visit my Aunt's House for a going-away-party for my Cousin Michelle. It's a bit silly, really. They live an hour away from us, and she's only going to college 10 minutes from our house, but we love our family so we'd promised we'd be there. It was just a very long tiring drive (my wife drove out there, I wasn't feeling well). I had intended to get some work done in the car, as I was now two days behind on my business work because of dad's computer, but I was feeling so bad I just ended up dozing until we got there.

I tried to drive home, too, but ended up being too tired. I decided it was safer to switch with my wife. The most significant part of the day had happened that morning - when the bassinet the baby was sleeping in broke, we've no idea how. The leg splintered and the wheel fell off, and there was no way he was going back in that tonight. That meant, of course, assembling the crib as soon as possible - which was, of course, after we arrived home from our long and tiring day with the family.

So I had to clean up all the computer parts and components and boxes which were literally covering our whole bedroom before we had enough room to set up the crib, which of course also involved moving every piece of furniture in the bedroom around to accommodate it. On that related side note, the bed is now in a corner and SUPER COMFORTABLE. There is no scientific explanation for it, but we LIKE the bed now. We sleep better, we sleep warmer, we sleep cooler and we sleep more comfortably. I tried to go to bed early, and it worked.

Sunday
I played hookie from church and slept until almost 11, my wife went though, but I defiantly needed the sleep. After 12 hours I was in much better shape. Today I had already decided to catchup on my server work - and I managed to do it and then some! I got done everything I'd wanted to get done on Thursday and Friday, and some additional work for Monday! It was very exciting.

Monday
I started off Monday trying to help my dad restore his computer, the baby was a bit fussy but tolerable. Especially once I turned Toy Story on. He's going to wear out that DVD, if such things are possible. We got most of the way through this day with almost all of his programs installed, but were still having difficulties finding the rest of his data. I was all set to take a break and have some lunch when my phone rang with a number I couldn't recognize.

It was my old boss - he was stuck out of the country and needed some art work done that day, so I told him no problem, packed up the baby, and headed back to work! My wife graciously took the baby to her office for the rest of the day and I ended up working until 7 to get the printers going so they would be all caught up - I also agreed to work the next day (today) all day! So here I am on...

Tuesday
And I'm back at the office for a full day for the first time in forever. Did I forget anything? No, not really. The hardest part? Climbing up the stairs to my office. I have changed my mind about wanting a two-story house.

I've gotten some bug fixing done this morning while I waited for some art to download, and I'm almost done with laying out what they needed me to layout today, which means maybe when they all get back into town (they think around 3 this afternoon) I might be able to go home and try and get some work done.

And that's been my crazy week!