The Misadventures of Dan

Peer into the mind of Dan as he tries to build an MP3 Player for his PDA and searches for the next thing in his life be it an electrical engineering job or graduate school.

Thursday, January 02, 2003

.:1:30:47 AM:.

This is a public service announcement by Dan: Backing up is oh so important. For the love of all things that are good and true, please, please, please back up your important files!

As you may have guessed-I came within a hair of a millimetre from losing it all. I've been trying to install Windows 98 onto my computer as a separate OS. That way I can dual boot between Windows 2000 and Windows 98. Now according to the help files I've been reading, the correct way to do this is to install Windows 98 first and then Windows 2000. The problem is that if you have Windows 2000 already installed and have adjusted everything to it, you don't want to format everything and start over again. That's like setting aflame to your insane homework assignment after you've finished it but before you handed it in! It doesn't make sense-at least not to me. So I read around, and found out that I could use this program called System Commander 7 to install a partition. This partition will then let me install windows 98. Simple no? Unfortunately like a lot of things in life, no. I had no problems installing System Commander, nor partitionning the drive. Big problems when Windows 98 started to take over. It wanted to format drive D. Drive D is also my "download" drive, I download whatever into D and then check it out afterwards. I thought that since it was in a "mode" this Drive D was different from the other Drive D and that this Drive D was the partitionned drive. I got suspicious when it started to format drive C. Drive C was my main Drive, the drive I use for Win 2000. Panicking I hit the greyed out cancel button (why have one if you can't hit it). To my horror when the formatting was finished and I did a simple check-nothing was there. I thought I lost everything. I had backed up a few of my files-as a precautionary measure but not everything. All my programs, all my settings, everything, gone. We're talking 10 gigabytes of stuff here! My stuff! My family's stuff! Everything!

So I called up my friend Greg, he's guy I usually go to bounce ideas, thoughts anything related to computers and stuff and told him the situation. I had talked to him the weekend earlier about doing this and he said to back up. Three hours later, after lots of frantic searching and trying various old MS-DOS commands we remembered from the good old days. We had this crazy notion for me to bring the hard drive over and for him to use a program to unformat the drive. In preparation I had hit the power switch but the computer resetted instead and guess what?

YES! I got my windows 2000 back, and now most of my drives are working (except for drive D). and now its time for me to go to bed.

UPDATE: This has been fixed

Tuesday, December 31, 2002

.:2:49:01 PM:.

I PASSED!!!

A big thank you to God and all my friends for having faith in me. I received a giant 21.6x27.9 cm (or 8.5x11") envelope containing my certificate and official wallet card. I am now a certified Engineering Intern in the state of Montanna.

Time to celebrate-oh and happy new year as well :)

.:1:35:58 AM:.

sigh...

Often the anticipation of something can be so high that the event itself is like an anticlimax to the whole thing. Despite it all though the event actually happened and I'm not sure what to think of it. I try not to build things up, nor to get overly hopeful, but sometimes I can't help it. I have questions, and thoughts are zooming through my head.

Wild spin, twists and turns,
Non-suspect, thin ice beneath,
Ticks without question,

How's that for being cryptic?

Sunday, December 29, 2002

.:5:07:43 PM:.

Quote from avrfreaks: If you already own an old STK200 or 300, you mave have run into problems: First, their hardware dongle does not seem to work well with all software under win2000. In this case, PonyProg has proven to be a good choice when it comes to programming software. Find it in the 'Tools' section or use the searchbox to the left of the page.

Second, the STK200/300 are discontinued by Atmel. They were previously produced for Atmel by Kanda, but now Atmel makes their own tools (the STK500, for instance). Hence, these tools are not directly supported by AVRstudio, regardless of Windows installation. You'll need something like the ATAVRISP which will complete the AVRstudio/STK200 or 300 constellation.

I feel somewhat vindicated. :)

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