Untitled Posted March 27, 2004 at 12:00 am

Ah, what a day.

I spent the first half of the day fixing my computer since I did myself the favor of breaking it yesterday. I found a custom boot disk image creatively called Emergency Boot CD that was helpful at times. I found the Smart Boot Manager to be the most useful feature on the disk. I eventually got Windows booting again by some combination of fixboot, fixmbr, and buildcfg from the Recovery Console. I’m still not sure exactly what fixed it but I did learn that Windows won’t let you enter the Recovery Console without the administrator password. I had long since forgotten/disabled the Administrator account so it posed a problem. Luckily, I found a way to disable the password for access to the console. I don’t think it’s a particularly useful security feature. If someone has physical access to my computer there are worse things they could do.

Fixing the computer was fun and all but Titus wanted to make my day a little brighter too by torpedoing my research topic. I should be grateful, I guess. It could have been worse if I had found out later. Basically, one of my fundamental assumptions was that ATM networks were packet-switched networks. Well, they’re not (couldn’t be further from the truth, even!). In the end, I had to start the research process anew. I eventually decided to shift to examining Quality of Service over packet-switched networks.

To top it all off, Kat was in town and she dropped by to visit. It’s about the last day that I would want anyone visiting but I guess I managed. Kat seems to really be getting into her whole new art discipline.