April 16, 2017

 I feel pretty good about the first half of my day. Things kind of went downhill during the second half.

I woke up this morning and had a bowl of cereal for breakfast. Then I put the elliptical back together. It was much easier than taking it apart. It helped that I had the right tools this time. I knocked it out with a socket wrench and this weird circular wrench that adjusts to the right size when you close the handles. It's pretty sweet. Following that, I cleaned the small shelf my mom got me yesterday and cleaned off the sticker residue that was on it. I'm still not entirely sure where I want it but I put it in my living room with some magazines and things and I'm going to see how I feel about it.

I played my guitar for awhile, learning the main riff of a Two Door Cinema Club song, and watched YouTube videos. And then I had the genius idea to install my new hard drive, which I went about very stupidly. The vast majority of my work happened with the computer still on. That was a mistake. At first I didn't think much of it because my PC case has two swappable hard drive bays, so you can easily pop a new hard drive in or take one out. Well, that method didn't work and it led to a lot of tinkering, still with the computer on. After some troubleshooting I determined that one of my SATA cables going to the swappable bays was bad. I changed that out and the hard drive showed up briefly I think, but the hard drive in the other bay disappeared. I tried several more things but could only ever get one hard drive in the bays to show up at a time. So something is happening there but I don't know what.

At one point I unplugged the power and SATA cables from my DVD drive and plugged them into the new hard drive just to see if the hard drive was bad. That ended up working so I ended up getting another power cable (thankfully I had one), plugging that into my PSU and then into the hard drive along with the new SATA cable.

The real downhill started when somewhere along the way one of my other hard drives disappeared. I'm not really sure what happened but it was most likely a result of playing with it when the computer was still on. After a lot of playing I got it to show up in Disk Management but only as a disk, not up top with all the named volumes. I tried to give it the original letter it had, in the hopes that it would then show up in My Computer again, but it wouldn't let me rename it. I eventually ended up downloading MiniTool Partition Wizard, which let me rename the drive (though it didn't stick) and let me “explore” it so I could see that all of my files are apparently still there. So I guess that's good. At least there's hope. Right now I am using MinitTool Power Data Recovery to see if I can actually recover the files. That's going to take many hours because it's nearly 2TB of crap. But we'll see what happens. If I can recover stuff I think the plan will be to put it on the new hard drive, reformat the one I messed up, and then move the stuff back to it. At the moment I'm right back where I started, minus nearly 2TB of information, so I've really taken a step or two back. The really annoying thing is that I had several audio journal videos on there that I still need to upload. The audio files are safe because I save those to my Dropbox, and I guess I should probably start doing that with the videos until I can get them uploaded. Lessons learned.

After my annoyance with that I went and laid in bed for an hour or so just to give up for a little while. It was nice.

Then I took a shower and got ready to go to my Mom's for dinner. But as I was about to put my shoes on I got a text from her postponing until tomorrow because she wasn't feeling well. So I fended for myself. I realized at five o'clock that I had forgotten to eat lunch. I can't remember the exact time line but I think I got sidetracked by the hard drive thing. I think the elliptical and shelf were solidly morning activities, so I don't think they are to blame. It is very weird though. I can't remember the last time I forgot to eat. I guess it made dinner better, because once I realized I hadn't eaten lunch I was pretty hungry.

Tonight I finished watching Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. As a whole I don't think I liked the movie. It could have been such a better movie if it had a better story. It's three hours long, most of it was spent showing how much Batman hated Superman, and then boom, Batman is over it and he's helping Superman. And then Wonder Woman shows up for the last battle. And the whole time Lex Luthor is killing a bunch of innocent people and I'm not entirely sure why he hated Batman or Superman so much. I may have missed it but they seemed to spend so much time on Batman beef with Superman that they forgot to explain Lex Luthor and his whole thing. Or maybe they did and I wasn't paying attention. Also, the ending. I get “killing” Superman as kind of like a palate cleanser because so many people in that world were upset with him. His death let them see him in a better light and reflect on their animosity toward him. But, Wonder Man could have easily wielded the spear and finished the job. She's a badass and and totally could have done it while Superman was distracting the dude. Oh well. In the end, I didn't like the story or Lex Luthor, but I liked the other three main characters (and Alfred). Even Ben Affleck as Batman. I think the potential is there when they get passed the origin story and his hatred of Superman.

After that I watched Coachella streams and the new Louis C.K. special on Netflix. I'm switching back and forth between the two. I'm a little annoyed because I want to see a few things that are going to be on later but I can't stay up that late. Or watch multiple streams at the same time. So far they only seem to be releasing individual songs but maybe they'll put up whole sets after the festival is over.

Also, an observation about Coachella fashion. It seems to be a thing now for some of the women who are performing to wear what I think looks like a high wasted diaper. They aren't bulky like a diaper, I guess it's more like a conservative bikini bottom shape that goes over the bellybutton. Right now Tove Lo is wearing these shorts, and early so was Kiiara and the lead singer of Phantogram. I think it looks weird but I'm not a fashionista, so what do I know.