10% (or more) idiot

This morning reminded me of a bit from Scott Adams' newsletter where he posited that there are not so much geniuses and idiots, but (and here I recall he failed to reference the proper fuzzy logic terminology behind this concept), people that are smart to a large or small degree, and that idiots are simply suffering from a very small degree of smart. However, even smart people have their moments of utter stupidity, just less frequently than people who are "dumb."

Usually I feel I'm on the plus portion of that fuzzy curve, but not today. This morning when I flipped on the power to my PC, the damned thing froze on the screen after the BIOS check. Though I've never encountered this error, I tried a number of things related to other previous... well, if not problems, then the idosyncrasies of my machine. Nothing worked. It would power-up, display the BIOS screen, then show all the h/w addresses then... stop.

After a half-hour of messing with it to no avail, I brought it to work for the IT guys to poke at. This entailed getting a ride to the train station, riding the train while straddling a full-size PC desktop case, and then holding it in both arms when boarding or leaving, and getting through the turnstiles while managing my railpass. I got it up the elevator, into work, and into the IT area. They plugged it in. It started to boot then froze at the same spot. There is always an odd sense of relief when the problem at least shows up as expected. When the problem just goes away for no apparent reason, it's a one-two punch: (1) I'm an idiot because there's not actually a problem (2) I'm fooked because the problem will probably show up again at a particularly schedule-devastating time. However two minutes later it was booting to OS smoothly as it had last night. "What did you do?!" I asked.

"There was a floppy disk in the A: drive."

Beet. Red. Face.

Yeah, okay. Normally there should be a "NON-SYSTEM DISK, OR DISK ERROR" type of message. In fact, right now, if I try and boot the machine with any other disk than the one that was in there, such a message appears. Using the current Mystery Disk causes the drive to fail to return an error, and just sit there seeking a boot track it will never find. I still don't know why. So it appears to be an issue of the way this floppydrive chooses to deal with this single floppy, and how the computer fails to notice that it's frozen.

Oddly, when I was running through the BIOS settings, I had a strange impulse to mess with the boot device items. "Floppy, Hard Disk, CD, LAN... Goodness, I'm never booting from the floppy, and I'm tired of that little hoot it makes every time. If I need to use a boot floppy, I can just change the BIOS then." Which would have coincidently fixed this oddly coincidental alignment of problem items.

Stupid, stupid conscious brain preventing perfectly good intuition from being effective.