I'll stick you.

Monday morning started like all others. I was tired as heck and my alarm clock was letting me know it was time to go. So, I listened to it. I headed into work. My computer was acting weird. It was running really slow. So, I checked the task manager. Everything in there looked fine. I have Windows XP, and the machine has 512 MB RAM. It had about 520 MB between Virtual memory and physical memory in use. That was not all that bad for what I normally do. So I rebooted anyhow to refresh the resources. Upon reboot it was running really slowly. There is a screen that will appear when booting Windows XP. It has about 3/8 inch white bars standing vertically. They are spaced about 1/4 of an inch across the bottom of the screen. As the OS loads the space between the bars is filled with white. This process takes a matter of seconds. On my machine it was taking a matter of minutes and then it froze up and said it could not boot. So, I knew there was some major problem. The nice thing is that I am the computer guy, so I was able to work on my problem without having to wait for someone else to help me fix it. So I tried to use the recovery console. I found that the winnt/system32/drivers directory was bad. So, I ran a check disk which helped the problem, but there was still a problem. So, I re-loaded Windows XP on top of it. That fixed most of the problems but made a few more. Now several of my applications did not work correctly. So I spent some time reinstalling some of them, and getting IIS up and running again. But it is mostly back to normal. With a few problems to be sure. But happily, it is mostly working fine. The question is what caused the problem to begin with.

After work I had fire training at Pullman Station 31. We were going to learn about doing blood sugar checks on people. The state of Washington decided to allow EMT-B's to be able to do the finger sticks. This is a neat step for us, as before we were unable to do any poking on someone like that. So, I need to do two more and then I will be certified to do them on people. Pretty cool, hey?

On of my customers at Lobo Computer Services had his computer at my office being worked on. I picked it up and delivered it to him after training. He works for a company that does heating and air conditioning stuff. So, he talked me through how to set up my gas dryer at my house.