“You know you’re a geek when…”

What a day. This morning I woke up to a missing NTLDR that turned out to be a corrupt MBR. I didn’t have an MCE CD because this is a newer HP that wants me to make full drive backups to use for FDISK/Format in lieu of reinstalling. So I tried making a bootable flash card, but couldn’t get it to fly. Then I went down to compusa, where I bought this laptop, thinking they’d have a bootable disc I could use there. No such luck. They had me call HP, who had me run a S.M.A.R.T. test in the bios prior to agreeing to ship an OEM CD.

And then I found the recovery partition (maniacal laugh). Several hours later, and no thanks to long conversations with the darlings in Calcutta who didn’t even MENTION this partition’s existence, MCE is up… … OS is working -and- updated, thunderbird and firefox reinstalled, Microsoft Office still telling me my product trial has expired (darn), and my messenger up and going. AND… my fridge is sparkling clean to boot — had to do something during the reinstall right? By chance, we found out hummus makes a really fabulous pizza sauce. I’m so random when I’m not tied to a computer.

By the way, if you need to access that extra partition on an HP Pavillion, try pressing F11 at boot. Who knew? If you choose to repair the windows installation (as opposed to a “destructive” restore) everything in your old documents will be there; you simply have to go “take ownership” of it.

So now with the computer functional again, I’m here playing catch up with work, and by chance got a moment to chat with a friend who is woefully in love with a guy who treats her horribly. She’d had an awful day. I suggested if she figures it out, she should write a book about “How to Fall out of Love with a Jerk”. She said, “If I did, I’d be rich.” And suddenly all the nerdiness I had to put myself through today spilled over.

“Then you could write the sql — How to Fall in Love with a Nice Guy”

Had I -really- just written SQL instead of sequel?! Pathetic, but true. What’s worse, I didn’t even notice till she’d left. Compelled by a sudden urge to do something creative, I decided to blog about it. How very un-geeky of me.

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P.S. You also know you’re a geek when you feel the need to prove your geekworthiness with Wikipedia because you know exactly what all the other geeks are going to say. So, please, no es-que-el flames:

“Structured English Query Language (“SEQUEL”) was designed to manipulate and retrieve data stored in System R. The acronym SEQUEL was later condensed to SQL because the word ‘SEQUEL’ was held as a trademark by the Hawker-Siddeley aircraft company of the UK.”

P.P.S. I can’t believe you read this whole article. You do know what that makes you, don’t you? Loving you for it 😉

P.P.P.S. w00t!