Now before you call the men in the little white jackets and see me break into a rendition of “They’re coming to take me away, HaHa!” please know that I really don’t think hard drive crashes are great…

Hard drive crashes suck if you’re not prepared – be ready

My hard drive on my pc at home really did crash last week, but luckily I had noticed some odd behavior a while back and had been backing up important stuff like pictures, videos and taxes. It still sucked when I got the blue screen BIOS boot failure and tried everything to get it back to no avail.

I bought a new hard drive, installed Windows 7 and since then I’ve been installing patches, printers, wifi, etc. It has consumed all of my normal home “work” time so I haven’t posted the last couple of days and I am doing this from my daughters laptop while itunes runs on my pc trying to recover music and podcasts.

A couple of good things about it are:

• I get a bigger hard drive
• Patching a new os and reinstalling programs take a lot of time, most of which is just waiting…

Waiting on patches really isn’t a good thing either, but in my case it allowed me quiet time to organize my thoughts on the Oracle SOA and Business Intelligence project and since the prototype review is today it worked out perfectly to give me some planning time for the rest of the project which goes another 6 months for this phase.

It also allowed me to change around my development plan to include some training, some architectural guidance, and most importantly, some hands on BI and SOA stuff I want to accomplish this year. I’ve always believed that you are responsible for your own career development and your manager should only be there to open doors and help you think through your goals with a corporate perspective and luckily I have that at Southern Company where I spend my days…

I hope you have the same perspective and make your own choices and if you don’t, start today. Come back tomorrow and tell me what choices you made today to improve your own tomorrow.