scanners, blue screens, and that guy

Image courtesy of Microsoft Windows

If the above image is not familiar to you, I do not blame you. In fact count yourself lucky. It is a screen you get when windows encounters a fatal error. It is the infamous BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH!!! This is not a joke and it can be really frustrating. Even better, it is like herpes. Once you get it, you cannot get rid of it. You will keep on getting BLUE SCREENS OF DEATH when you least expect it. And it will drive you mad.

I am sure you are now thinking, "That won't happen to me. It will happen to someone else." Let me tell you something. Have you heard of 'that guy'? The guy who's laptop crashes at the last minute while working on something important. Or the guy who loses all of his personal stuff. When I first got my laptop at the academy, I was told to back up my documents so that I won't lose it. I thought, "Yeah right, I am not that guy." The tech guys even told us horror stories and I refused to believe. That was four years ago.

Fast forward to 2009, I shutdown my computer and take it to my project partner's room. I try to boot it up and viola.. yes, it was there... the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH!! I thought it would fix itself after a while. But no... it wouldn't. Comes the next day, I still can't get to even switch on my computer because of the damned thing. Finally I went to the computer repair guys and I pleaded with them to atleast get my documents from the hard drive. The guy there was really nice. He removed the hard disk and tried to get the data. BUT THE GOD FORSAKEN THING WAS BROKEN!! He couldn't access the hard disk even remotely and finally I had to face the inevitable: I lost all of my stuff. My pics, my writings, and most importantly my course work. Than God that I had turned in all of my papers.

There was only one silver lining in my dark clouds. I have a separate laptop that I use to work on my senior design project. It contained a year's worth of research and documents that it would kill me if I lost the stuff. Besides, our projects day was right around the corner. Exactly 2 days away. For my project, my team made a system which would be able to scan a material into a depth of 2 mm using an infra red light. I was incharge of writing the software. So anyway, I kept telling myself that I could have lost all of that.

The day before the projects day, we did a final run through and got some screen shots to prepare our presentation. We were all set for the next day. Next morning, I went to the lab, gathered everything we needed. Right before heading out to setting up the system in the presentation area, I wanted to do one final run through. I switched on the computer and yeah... you guessed it... I got the blue plaque from the IT God!!! The thing did not start and everyone had already left. I managed to find a desktop PC which had a backup of our software and we looked like fools carrying a CPU and a screen when everyone else were setting up their projects with laptops, projectors, and big LCD monitors.

On a side note, since then I have gotten the BSOD (I am getting tired of writing it) 5 times on my personal laptop and I still cannot access the project laptop. It's like a curse...

Adios...