[8/19/2010 SteppersUSA Daily News]
I'm (Hyper) Venting
By Markie Bee
National Chicago Style Steppers Day
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I'm just (hyper) venting here but... There are some days you feel you're better off not getting out of bed and today started off like one of those days. I worked late into the night last night capturing and reviewing every video clip I shot from the WLSC Chicago semi-finals (over 100 gigabytes and four plus hours of video). It took four and a half hours just to capture the tapes to the hard drive and about six hours to review the video... add a couple more hours for note taking and planning and I was exhausted when I hit the pillow at about 4am. I woke up to find I was still connected to the internet (which is something I try not to do when I'm not using the computer... it's just a good idea to disconnect when you're not actively using it. At some point during my sleeping hours A Java update downloaded itself and was asking to be installed so in my early morning hazed state of mind I told it to install... major mistake! The software was demanding a reboot and I figured since I hadn't rebooted in a while it was a good idea so bam! After the reboot my keyboard wouldn't work and windows wouldn't start. I played with putting other keyboards on the computer and when that didn't seem to help, I started to disconnect hard drives and other items attached to the machine. After messing around with different configurations for an hour or two the machine recognized the original keyboard but by then my windows installation was saying I was having problems starting! (And I thought I was the master of the obvious).

 

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I got the thing to go to safe mode where I restored key windows files from the back-up I just did the other day and one by one I plugged in the peripherals like the hard drives and the broadband modem, etc. Everything was working pretty much as intended although the machine is a little sluggish which means the Windows hard drive is probably fragmented so there goes a couple more hours.
I have a few other things I need to do that don't have anything to do with the computer so once I get that defrag working I'm offline for a while. I really need to unwind a bit!
I see from the email there are a few new links to photos from Saturday's NCSSD event in the Chicago Style Stepping Facebook group. Keep sharing the experience... I know there are lot's of photos out there from Saturday from many cities so make sure others see what you've experienced.
When asked if there will be a 2011 National Chicago Style Steppers Day Event, The short answer is yes it will be an annual event held on the weekend of the second Saturday in August. Overall, the event was a smashing success in that we managed to pull the whole thing off. Once we've had some time to digest and machinate what happened over the weekend we will have a teleconference to discuss what went right and what went wrong and to entertain ideas for next year.

The J.E.P. Productions Hotter than July steppers contest is now on sale and can be ordered online here. Or Right Here!

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