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Thursday 9 October 2014

Weekus Horribilis

...in which a rather Bad Thing has occurred

First things first; I'm still within my target weight range, or at least I was on Monday when I got weighed (I now get Slimming World membership for free as long as I'm within 3lbs either side of my target).

Marathon training is continuing, and going pretty well; I'm still doing over the actual amount suggested by the Asics training plan as the runs would be quite short if I stuck to them (5 miles...I'm not sure when 5 miles became a "short" run for me, but it's weird how perception changes).

Anyway, the Bad Thing...this week my PC's hard disk has been more or less completely wiped due to a combination of a Blue Screen of Death and a hard reset performed out of impatience (not by me, I hasten to add - I was out at the Younger Teen's football match). 

When Windows attempted to reboot it ran ChkDsk (a utility for scanning and "fixing" a disk) and the result was that it moved nearly all of my files to a hidden directory, but in the process it's renamed them to nonsense.

I'm currently running some software to attempt to recover what data I can; I have backups of my work for clients, of course, but some other data that should really have been backed up to a different drive has not been for a little while (I'll be setting up an automated backup procedure as soon as this is done...lesson learnt the hard way).

This has led to a sequence of events that can be summed up as buy new hard disk, install Windows 8, realise I have to install Windows 7 first because I only have an upgrade license for Windows 8, Install Windows 7 Home Premium, upgrade that to Windows 7 Pro, then upgrade that immediately to Windows 8, all the while wondering why Microsoft couldn't have just included the ability to check a Windows 7 key in the Windows 8 upgrade install.

That process (and the missing data) has led to a few days of being a bit fed up, which in turn has led to not eating brilliantly, culminating in a bit of a crisp-and-wine-fest last night. Today I am back on the Slimming World train though; Slimming World quiche will be made for dinner, with paprika wedges (the kids can have pizza and chips as they won't eat the quiche).

Anyway, on the plus side I now have a "clean" C:\ drive with very little on it other than the operating system, development software, Open Office and a bit of software that tries to recover deleted files (currently doing a scan on the ex-drive, which is apparently going to take a total of around 75 hours).

Oh yes, and I was in the local paper last night. They haven't put the story online, but it was about the weight I'd lost and the fact that I'm running a marathon next year. So that's quite nice :).