Brains working towards machine consciousness

On Monday, I nipped out only to come home and find my Windows 7 machine had a Blue Screen of Death.  That has happened a couple of times recently - I am pretty sure that it is due to an antique wifi dongle, which has been playing up for a little while.  Irritating but not too much trauma - a reboot is all that is needed.  Only this time, the system can't find the operating system.  NTLDR not found.

OK, that isn't too much of a problem; normally.  Of course, what I hadn't realised at that point is that Win7 doesn't use NTLDR.  That was because the system was trying to boot from an old partition on one of my (now) data disks, rather than its system disk.  Why? Well, I still don't know.

The nice chaps in ITNG were able to provide me with an emergency recovery disk.  I was thinking it was just going to be a case of fixing the mbr on the boot disk - but that didn't work.  Indeed, nothing I did, in terms of the system software/configuration worked.  On the other hand, unplugging all the drives and re-connecting them did.  But all the drives had been accessible before, so it wasn't that there was a bad connection - they were reliably present and responsive, except in terms of booting the machine.  Odd.

This morning I woke up late.  As it turns out, only slightly late (about 20 minutes) but it felt like it must have been getting on for mid-day.  And I woke with one of those fuzzy-heads, which means it takes a little while to get going.  On the bright side, this gave me half an hour to play with my Godson which is a nice way to start the morning (if a bit of an insistent way to start it!).  I left home, only to discover the road I usually use was closed.  The detour took me further away from work than home is.  I still managed to get in by 10am though, which was darned impressive.

One of my websites had been flagged by the JANET service as being mentioned in spam.  As it turns out, this was just down to me leaving a social networking test site I had been experimenting with open for registration, and forgetting that it was even there.  I had rather hoped it had been hacked, because at least then I could have investigated to find out what the flaw was.  As it is, the flaw was just me being a numpty!

Hopefully that is the days nuisances over and done with - tonight I am on a panel at a #140conf session, which had to change venue last night; I am hoping that the trip there and the evening will be a lot less complicated than the last couple of days!