#71 Things lost, things sought, things found

Data mining. Not sure why I bothered. Forensics is much more practical. 2 hours until the exam and I'm procrastinating. I'm surprised though, since there's really nothing else to worry about.

Hornet stung me last week. I'd rather not remember, but if you have seen my shiny silver USB key, I'd appriciate getting it back. Such a small trifle, but felt as such a great loss.

The lab I'm in now sounds like the forlorn plains of Valhalla, mostly because I'm sitting beside an air duct and it's raining buckets outside. Noisy buckets. Noisy wind.

What I imagine will console me in the end is knowning I did all I could with the knowledge and resources at my disposal. It is a setback to lost such a thing, most of all because I cannot remember what it conatined. To lose a trinket is but a minor annoyance. To lose an important memory is an agrievance.

Time will pass and we we lean more and more on magnetic signals and digital memory. Fo all our wants of ability to forget that which we'd rather not keep, there may well come a time when we can simply move our failings onto a small plastic chip and bury them for posterity. Would we learn? Maybe. If it is a memory of an old mistake that can prevent its reoccurance, then we might prefer to know the memories and mistakes of others. Worysome is the thought that experience might be bought.

The email server was down when I logged in earlier. Clemency, and my gratitude for it. This does not mean I'll stop trying to find my lost USB key. If a priest can be found in the jungle (I knew they'd get him back), then a key can be found on a campus.

#14 What an awful prang

And so, a standard reinstall ended up with a virused machine. Not a great week.

I'll get'er done eventually. Stats though, they've changed.

Confidence took a hit because I screwed up majorly
Memory, a perceived stat, took a hit too. I'd already downloaded the software in work where it wreaked havoc. For some reason, I thought the same software wouldn't cause the same problem.

Lemme paint the bigger picture here: Sibelius 2 needed a reinstall. I uninstalled it. Silly man, don't click custom!! Oh Noes!! Now the folder with all Dads work in it has been uninstalled too!!

Oie...

Ok, so try and reinstall? Okie, where's the serial number?

Oh Noes!!!! No serial number! Uninstall again? Yes. Oh dear, where are all the work scores? Oh noes... They've been wiped! Quick, get the Helix disc! FTK or FileRecovery! Save me!!

Oh NOES! They didn't help at all! Hmmm, what to do... Other recovery software? Worth a try... Even though FTK says the folder is all zeros now.

Ok, what's the best one? Recover my files? K, let's try this... later.

Oh, the guys at work wiped a flash card. I have recover my files. Let's try it.

Eeep. That installer was virused. Now the work computer needs to be fixed.

Hm, shame about what happened at work. Let's try the same file at home.

Oh noes. Oh NOES!! Now my home PC has a virus! Damn you smit.fraud!

Oie, this isn't pretty.

But at least now I have all the tools I need to fix both infections :(
smit.fraud isn't malicious (if kaspersky is to be believed) but it's a right pain to remove.

So as you can see from the above story, I did a series of very stupid things. Worse still, I kept rushing into doing stupider things.
Both infected systems have dual boot (two operating systems - 1 good, 1 bad), so fixing them won't be completely impossible. I just need to work out a pathology to success. Everyone has problems, but very few have solutions. I should count myself lucky.

My wish for a superpower is to know the exact solution to any problem I encounter. I mean I could say scientific problem or engineering, but why limit what I might need to know? The internet already has this power. It wouldn't be beyond my powers of learning either. In the story above, I've had to learn from necessity.

Another harsh lesson.