One of those quiet, frantic Wednesdays...

Windows did one of those funny things that it does from time to time last night, as I prepared to shut down the machine. I categorically could not close two open Word windows.

No biggie, I thought, and realizing that I was not about to lose any work, I set the system shutdown process going and watched as the windows closed and shortly thereafter turned off my monitors.

This morning, the machine was still on, presumably still in some kind of "on its way to shutdown" condition, so I attempted the three-finger salute (which didn't work), whereupon I turned the machine off by main force (the long button-press of OFF).

After waiting the requisite time for the disk to spin down, I turned the machine back on and everything went well, up until the startup appeared to finish altogether too soon.

Indeed, only a handful of processes had been started, and when I tried to open a directory window, the system threw an error message on the screen that suggested various services that normally run upon startup were not running.

Now this could be the result of some kind of virus, malware, or (at the risk of being redundant) Windows Update. Or it could be a glitch in the startup routine, the result of some file becoming corrupted.

My money is on the second option (unless the problem is due to a Windows Update problem, but the Internet reports no sudden spate of problems along these lines, so I'm not sure how likely that is), mostly because (a) I do have an active antivirus/antimalware suite operating, (b) historically, my behavior online results in only rare encounters with threats (which, granted, would be meaningless for a threat that was encountered and not recognized), and (c) the particular malfunction I appear to be experiencing seems an odd thing for malware to do.

So I'm trying out the system repair option on a Windows 7 system disk, but to do that, I must first decrypt my system disk.

And here I was hoping for a calm, quiet Wednesday, not a frantic, quiet one...

Potential solution found...

Upon completing the decryption, my system rebooted and pretty much went through a normal startup.

So what had changed?

Well, in preparation to run the starup repair routine from the Windows 7 DVD, I had removed the SD card that more or less permanently resides in the machine's slot for such cards, and it was only after a successful reboot after decryption was completed—which makes me wonder, why didn't the machine boot from the DVD?—that I recalled an episode from a while back in which my machine displayed a BSOD upon bootup, complaining about Something Bad™ having happened upon trying to use the driver that mounts SD cards, whereupon I shut the machine down, removed the card, used the eraser of a No. 2 pencil lightly on the conductive pads (a technique I picked up as a radio operator in the Marines, which has the effect of removing any crud that may have accumulated), reinserted the card, and tried starting up again, with success.

So I suspect that what happened today was not so serious as to require a BSOD, but serious enough to cause the system to terminate its startup routine. Right now, the SD card (with pads freshly "erased") is back in the machine, which is booting as I tap this entry.

(I just looked in on the process, which appears to have completed without mishap.)

I should probably erase the pads every two or three weeks as a precautionary measure, to avoid such events in the future.

* * *The other night, Galina and I were feeling the munchies while driving home along 146 in Seabrook, when we spied a Pizza Hut and decided we would make it a "pizza night." My past experience with Pizza Hut, however, caused me to fire up Siri on my iPhone to see if there was any alternative pizza joints in the area. It turned out there was a Domino's between where we were and home, so I called in an order and we drove over, which took less than five minutes.

The "anchor" establishment in the same mini-strip mall is a bar called the "Cock & Bull," a name that never fails to remind me of my mother and of the way she would dismiss the, uh, occasional, er, prevarication that I offered at times during my adolescence ("That sounds like a 'cock and bull' story to me, young man!"). Anyway, there was still quite a bit of time to wait until the pizza would be ready, so we visited the bar, which calls itself "an English-style pub."

Having never really gotten a good feel for the structure and routine of an English pub—this would require, ahem, more research (much more)—I cannot comment on how "English" the place it. I can tell you about the closest thing on tap to what you'd find on the other side of The Pond was Guinness. When I ordered one, the bartended "upsold" me on something called "Laughing Dog Imperial Stout" (aka "The Dogfather"), which was a bourbon-aged product from a brewery in Ponderay, Idaho.

It was quite good, but it was so satisfying, I had no desire for another one, which was okay, as I find it awkward for one beer to cost almost as much as the large pizza one is planning to take home and eat.

* * *Something I saw at an estate sale a week or two ago finally dislodged a memory of my own. It was a box of electronic tubes, ruinously overpriced, but which got me to thinking that perhaps there might be some ham equipment in the rubble (there wasn't).

Today, by some circuitous route, I recalled how my stepdad would, on occasion, go through the ritual of moving our television away from the wall, removing its back cover, and removing a candidate "faulty tube" from somewhere in the guts of the box (selected with the aid of a book that contained images of malfunctioning screens that were keyed to specific tubes). Then he and I would go down to a shop—I forget what it was, but it wasn't a television repair shop, as I recall—where he would insert the tube in a socket of a test device festooned with several dozen such sockets of various size, press a test button, and after a few seconds find out if the tube was good or bad. Using the tester was almost like playing a slot machine, where a "jackpot" consisted of finding that the right tube (or one of perhaps several malfunctioning tubes) had been taken out for testing.

This kind of thing occurred every year or two, and I recall that my stepdad generally 'hit the jackpot' more often than not in such encounters. Visits by professional repair techs were rare in our house.

Cheers...