When your computer fails on you

Problems! I really wanted to write about my amazing(-ly cold) weekend in Stockholm but I haven't transferred the pictures from the cameras yet (we were four people and three cameras). Actually I won't transfer my pictures to my pc. No, I'm not lazy and yes I got all the three different cables. The reason is my new hard drive which I installed 3 – 4 months ago. It really gave my computer the performance boost I needed but out of the blue (I haven't noticed it earlier) I got read errors (which extremely old drives along with my new one suffer from). HD Tune confirmed the errors but Samsung Support wanted me to check with their utility (HUTIL) instead. This morning I spent over an hour in DOS just to see that there are actually eight bad sectors on the drive. That's funny since I haven't dropped the drive or the computer at all.

A final test was needed: do the same test again but with all data erased. Since I have the old drive left I decided that I simply would put all the backup data on the new one (a bit risky I know) and then clone the new drive to the old drive. In this way I would not lose any documents, music files, installed programs etc. Now, writing this I have to abandon my plan (actually no plan could have saved my entire OS or installed programs). When trying to clone the defect drive it could not complete... because of read errors. So this is probably one of the last things I will write on my Word 2007 SP1 and I have to face another excruciating pain reinstalling software I need and re-uninstalling software I don't need. Now that I'm complaining I might as well whine about Microsoft's Live-ID which only seems to work half of the time. If Microsoft really wants to make a "Cloud OS" people might actually want it to work.

That's that for this post. Hopefully next time (on a freshly installed machine) I will be able to post some photos from Stockholm along with comments from dinners at fancy restaurants.

Åbent Hus (SDU – Odense)

That's an interesting title for those of you who aren't Scandinavian or didn't take a Danish language course just for fun. It really means 'open house day' and SDU-Odense is one of Denmark's largest universities. Actually I have given up the hope of being able to choose a university quite long ago, since I don't have top grades and I want to be a neurologist (brain doctor). But it is always nice to visit the university just to get a feeling for it. Odense has a really modern look but despite this it feels rather dark inside. When we reached the top floor during the guided tour it felt like we were in a cellar. Funnily enough they have huge windows, but apparently the choice of colours (brown and rust red) makes it feel darker, which actually bothers me a bit. The point of building a modern campus would, in my opinion, be to make it as light as possible.

The people at the medicine stand were nice and overall Odense seems to be a good place to study. The city (located about 5 km from the campus) is medium sized and has many shops and restaurants. Not that a full-time student will ever have that much money or time, but the amount of places you could spend your time/money feels important nonetheless.

Other important things I've just done are: passing my driving theory test, completing my application for Danish universities, and reading the newspaper backwards.