The past few days I've been mostly "offline" due to an interesting situation: I turned my laptop OFF Thursday night, thinking I'd "give it a rest," then when I tried to boot on Friday, I had a minor moment of fright as the system wouldn't fully boot. It kept on trying to Start Windows and then before the desktop came up, it would cyclically reboot back to the start.

As luck would have it, the hard drive at that time had the original Dell Diagnostics laid down in a special partition (perhaps they're in a motherboard chip?) which allowed me to use the special bios boot key (F2 or F12) when then allowed me to run diags which popped up a "DST-0146" error. I can recall numerous times telling people over the phone they had an option: a) send their drive out to a data recovery specialist and THEN get a replacement hard drive, or b) just get a replacement hard drive.

Countless are the folks who "lost" all their personal (and often professional) data simply because they had not backed up their files to a different source. I myself had a fairly decent backup from around May 9th, although the "full" backup was from around March.

I figured I had a "little" bit of wiggle room / time to play around, so I tried a "Hail Mary" procedure of "reloading" the Windows OS (operating system) over the existing one *without* wiping out the full, existing data on the drive (the Windows OS installation gives you an option, to wipe and reload, or simply just reload, often considered a "dirty" way of restoring the OS.)

I figured, what the heck? I just want to see if I can recover my full data, so why not?

Sure enough, the "dirty install" worked! I was able to come back up to full desktop condition and from *there* fully backup my data files (AND software library) to an external drive (an older IDE hard drive that allowed me to copy from THERE to a backup-PC, basically giving me TWO "full dumps" as backup.)

As luck would have it, there was another SATA hard drive (HDD) that was being used intermittently with the IDE as one of my backup drives. Upon comparing the SATA drive with my existing (DST-0146 failing) drive, it turns out the bkup SATA drive is actually larger in capacity (250 GB compared to the failing 150 GB) (all numbers here are approximations) and has a faster spin speed of around 7200 RPM compared with the older 5100 RPM. If you think of those in terms of MPH on a car, you get an idea of the difference between 51 MPH and 72 MPH, or in jet speeds, between mach 1 and mach 2.

So I spent all day Friday doing data backups and transfers, then late Friday night began the OS reinstall and subsequent restoration of backed-up data to the laptop.

Saturday was spent putting things back in place, and Sunday was spent "tweaking" bits here and there (so my shortcuts were all where I wanted them, etc.)

Now here I am, posting in the dream blog on Monday, however, I must say, it's NICE to be able to simply type IN the blog's html rather than having to compose offline and upload it. However, I do appreciate having learned the trick of composing offline and xfering the post into the html, and I still use that in areas of "critical thinking."

So LAST night / this morning, I've been doing a LOT of meditation upon John 7:24, "Judge not according to appearances but the righteous judgment judge.." (Logically speaking, that reduces to 1 ∩ 0, "1 intersect 0," or "Love intersect nothing.") At any rate, besides all that this brings to mind, I had a 2-word "phrase" that passed through my mind almost as if it were a "line of darkness" shot like an arrow from right to left. It stated "Fiery things" (although the spelling of "Fire-y" may not have been too clear, the *meaning* was!) and I'm expecting all KINDS of chaos to start erupting more and more around the Middle East and possibly the West and East Coasts of America (excluding Florida.) At any rate, I'm still keeping my eyes peeled toward July 2024 to see what that data "reveals."

Meanwhile, for those who care to study the "Logic of Jesus," please feel free to visit tinyurl.com/IntroToTheAdvocate for more "stuff."