Month: January 2008

About six weeks ago I began watching some children’s cartoons in the morning on the Family/Disney channel because I have to get up early to give my cat her insulin shot. I did that for a couple of weeks. The new year began and the television season resumed. Thanks to the writer’s strike (and I don’t mean that sarcastically) there were very few shows that actually had new episodes. I watched a couple of other kid’s shows and before I knew it, I was hooked.

For the past three weeks I have been watching the Family/Disney channel almost exclusively and couldn’t be happier. I still watch whatever episodes air of the adult shows I watch, but I have given up A Daily Show and Colbert Report (which are worthless without writers anyway).

Stress is a mental condition yet can manifest physical symptoms (which can actually be permanent). If feeling bad can damage your health, then why can’t feeling good improve it? They do say that laughter is the best medicine… In that vein, I now prefer children’s programming to adult programming. For some reason adults are obsessed with feeling bad. Adult shows and movies insist on depicting sad and depressing events with characters getting sick and dying. Just take a look at Oscar-winning movies: the vast majority of them are crappy, dramatic, retarded-gay-child-has-horrible-life-and-gets-cancer-and-dies types; the more depressing the better. Children’s programs on the other hand are all optimistic and hopeful. They still portray conflict, but nothing serious or permanent, and always fixable by the end of the episode.

As a side benefit, whereas adult’s programs are—very—slow paced and get boring very quickly, children’s programs are designed for shorter attention spans, and are thus much more entertaining and engaging. I have found that I can watch them much more easily than adult programming, and they hold my attention until the end. The one down side is that they tend to have silly sound effects and stuff which can occasionally be irritating.

Ever since I began watching kid’s shows, I have noticed that I do in fact feel better and my depression has lessened. I also feel better physically and have fewer pains and aches.

So if you are sick and feeling terrible, just take a couple of kid’s shows and call me in the morning.

I made a big mistake last week. My script that cleans out all caches and deletes all possible temporary files to free up as much space as possible malfunctioned. Windows did a weird thing it has done a couple of times in the past few months were the TEMP environment variable stops expanding any variables it contains, and thus pointing to an incorrect directory. It is solved simply by rebooting, but I unwisely decided to clear the caches (which is a task I often do prior to shutting down) before rebooting. When the script executed, instead of deleting the files in the temp directory, it deleted C:\, recursively. That’s right, it deleted Windows, Program Files, Documents and Settings, and everything in C:. Unfortunately I did not notice this until it had made its way through most of the drive. Fortunately, I stopped it before it got too far into the Documents and Settings folder. It managed to wipe out all files in \Windows and \Program Files that were not in use (open) which included most of Windows and the files required to boot.

Obviously the first thing to do was to NOT reboot. At that point, rebooting would have been death since most of the files required to boot were gone. I managed to keep a cool head and quickly popped in the DVD that contains the most recent PowerQuest DriveImage image of the Windows drive (which unfortunately was from 2006). I opened it with the PQIExplorer (the PQIBrowser is really, really slow when extracting files), and extracted all files from C:\ in it to C:\ making sure to click NO to the overwrite prompts. The problem was that clicking No-To-All doesn’t work and seems to just be the same as the Cancel button, which hence required clicking No (or rather pressing the N key) a whole lot of times. I actually tried using macros to automate it, but that didn’t work as expected and caused more problems. A good, simple, effective, low-tech solution was to simply place a small, heavy object on the N key to hold it down and come back in an hour.

Eventually, the drive was restored (for all intents and purposes), and it was time to chance a reboot. As expected, it did not work. Luckily I knew instantly what the problem was: the boot files were missing. Apparently I focused too much on restoring the folders and forgot the files in the root. Doh! I spent the next couple of hours trying to figure out how to use the pqiextd command line tool to extract the missing files from the image in DOS mode. I could neither find the BAT file I used last time I needed to extract files from a PQI image from the command line, nor could I view the manual since the DOS PDF viewer (Adobe Acrobat 1.0) could not open that version of PDF files. Eventually, it dawned on me to just get a copy of the files (ntldr and ntdetect.com) from the Windows install CD. That took all of five seconds and I rebooted once again.

This time, Windows actually managed to start, and even boot! I went to bed and spent the following day restoring the system as much as possible. This included removing apps that have been removed since the last backup, installing apps that were installed since then, updating some others, reinstalling some device drivers, and checking and re-updating Windows.

Amazingly enough, the system was about 80-90% restored—although some settings files are gone—in only about one day. Despite what the haters may say, Windows is surprisingly resilient and not as spaghetti-code as they make it out to be. DLL-Hell nothing, Windows managed to bounce back from near-annihilation with little effort. Let’s see OSX or *nix do that.

*UPDATE*
I updated the clearing script to prevent this from happening again. It was as simple as placing a protected dummy marker file in the temp folder’s parent, and testing for it’s existence in the script, before deleting. Nice.