It has been one of those weeks.

I’m sure it’s because my mind has been on my cousin Ryan’s health and not focused on work, but this week I’ve made more dumb mistakes at work than I’ve made probably in the past 10 years.

Earlier in the week I volunteered a “spare” server to another department. Only after I had delivered it did we realize not only was the server still in use, but it had been powered on when I had unhooked it! Quickly, we found another server to give to them, and got the one we needed back. Last night I was supposed to reboot several servers, but I did them in the wrong order and locked up a dozen or so boxes. Nice.

And then there’s my laptop. First I reloaded it but forgot to patch it. That new WMF exploit is quite proficient, it only took a matter of minutes to completely destroy my hard drive. Fortunately, I still had my data backed up on the server, so I reloaded my laptop — again. Then I was trying to fix the “rights” and managed to lock myself out of my own hard drive. I attempted to load a boot manager, which proceeded to lock me out of the entire computer. After a couple of hours of messing around with the damn thing I’ve got the additional problems solved and I’m back to the main problem, which I’m hoping a reinstallation over the top of my current operating system will fix. ARGH! Nothing like killing an entire day on a stupid problem.

In other news, the last news I’ve heard about Ryan seems to be encouraging. Apparently he’s become more responsive, blinking in response to questions and even holding a ball. While the whole experience has been a bit of an emotional roller coaster for everyone involved, this certainly seems like a good sign!