Sometimes Slowing Down Is Fun

I found out the other day that slowing down and taking time to enjoy your surroundings can be a good thing. I ran the Disneyland 1/2 marathon on Sunday and because of sore knees brought on by running San Francisco hills while trying to create a new PR, I was forced to slow down a bit. What this allowed me to do was to stop and take pictures and have my picture taken and to really enjoy the first 4 miles of the run which took me through both California Adventure and Disneyland.

The Princess and the Me

Because I wasn't worried about my time, I was able to share time with princesses which made the run a bit more bearable.

Of course, when I wasn't Poppin out of the race to take some pictures I was wondering witch characters to pose with next.

As I was trooping along, I figured that would about do it for the park so I began running the long, boring part.

That was, until I was able to see myself as others see me and I began to feel the satisfaction that comes with a job well done.

One that you see from start to

After all, it's not always about the medal.

Today was some day

I knew from last night that today was going to be a challenge but I wasn't really that concerned because I thought I knew what I was going to have to deal with, a reporter with a hard drive problem, a meeting with the owners about the state of IT at Hutchings, another reporter who was having some setup issues after an attorney knocked her laptop to the floor, and a client's computer that was rebooting periodically and locking up. All do-able. Well, I started at Fry's Electronics to pick up a new power supply for the client since I figured the reboots were heat related. Found one at a good price with a rebate. Nice. Picked up an external connector for the reporters hard drive figuring I'd be able to plug it into another computer and and copy the files off of it.
Well, when I put the new power supply into the computer, it continued to reboot and lock up. Not good. I'll look at it later. Met with the reporter, took her old drive out of the computer, plugged it into another computer, and it couldn't be found. I plugged it into a 2nd and a 3rd computer and it couldn't be found. There were some jobs on that drive that needed to get to attorneys like today. Really not good. It seemed that the only option at that point was to send the drive to a recovery center at the cost of about $1000. Even worse.
I went to the computer store to pick up a new hard drive for her computer and while I was there, I picked up another external enclosure for the drive. When I got back to the office, I put the old drive in the new enclosure and plugged it into a computer. The computer recognized it but then I found out that it was an empty drive. Somehow, all of the files were gone. I had just the day before read about a recovery program Recuva. Had nothing to lose so I downloaded it and ran it against the drive. After about 3 hours, it showed some files that were recoverable. Fortunately, some of those files were the very job files that were needed. Looking better. I was able to recover those files, the reporter was able to finish editing them and out they went to the attorneys. Feeling better.
Now, back to the pc. I tried another power supply and got the same result. Instant reboots. What was going on....Then I happened to notice that one of the internal cables had become unplugged. I replaced it, turn the computer on, and it booted all the way to the desktop. Feeling good, but a bit tired.
Met with the other reporter, the one with the setup issues, took care of those and rescheduled the meeting with the owners.
Feeling like I need to kick my feet up and have a nice shot of tequila.

Well, the day started like crap and ended up at the top. Came out feeling like I really accomplished some things today. I was some day.