Keep Moving Forward
Posted: February 22nd, 2009 | Author: eetion | Filed under: persistence, videos | 1 Comment »So Many Problems! – Computers
“Why did the computer turn off,” I asked myself. I’d only stepped into the bathroom for a second. After a good four hours of work at my day job, I was ready to get to reading and blogging. After pressing the start button on my tall black custom computer case, my screens started to flicker slightly, as they usually do when they figure out that I’m turning the computer on again, but this time nothing came up after the monitors turned on.
For a second I thought maybe something is unplugged, but when I finally decided to get down on the floor and tune my eyes to the components which I’d suspected, a horrible –HORRIBLE, I TELL YOU- stench took hold of my nostrils.
I had no idea what it was but I guessed it might be my mother board. A broken mother board would mean a lot of screws would have to be messed with to get this computer back in working order, not to mention a visit to the local computer store, and a nice gash into my bank account.
As it turns out, the problem was … well, the problem was my power supply. The power supply was smoking and filling my small apartment with an atrocious smell. After checking the rest of the components on the motherboard, I was confident that nothing else had been fried because of the bad psu (that’s short for power supply unit).
After a nice long visit to Fry’s electronics, I ended up with a new keyboard/mouse combo, and a new expensive power supply. In about no time, after disassembling the old and assembling the new, I was ready to press the power button again.
Unfortunately nothing happened on my screen after pressing the power supply, but all the computers components were on and running. The fans were spinning, everything seemed to be working, but nothing was coming up on the screen! What in the world could be the problem here?
Well, turns out that my big fat video card no longer wanted to be in it’s assigned space anymore –or, rather, wanted to move around a bit. After moving the video card around a few different slots and then finally back to it’s original assigned slot (it was a pci-e slot), I’d press the power button and my boot screen would show up! Hurray! But there’s more.
The boot screen would show up for about 5 seconds and then I’d get the infamous blue screen of death. What could be the problem now!?
So I googled around a bit, and found a few answers as to what the problem could be: apparently, windows vista is known to occasionally have an issue with nvidia video cards. But, the issue is so subtle, you wouldn’t know how to fix it unless someone had told you. In fact, it’s so … it’s not even worth mentioning. All that matters is that I did the fix, arrived at my boot screen again, and encountered a NEW “blue screen of death”.
This time, the blue screen said I have a memory problem. O really?
I was ready to give up a long time ago. But I persisted.
Having values of “forever” for some goals isn’t a matter of motivation. Motivation is the urge to seek positive feedback. Persistence is the ability to continue forward in the complete absence of any.
http://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2008/07/09/how-to-measure-your-degree-of-persistence/
Memory problems. Ok, I’ve got four dimms (sticks) of ram in this thing, totaling eight gigabytes, so I’ll just take them all out and stick them all back in one by one until I find the problem. Well, I did that. One by one they all proved to be working.
After reinstalling the last stick of ram, guess what happened. The computer booted up into Windows 7 like nothing was ever wrong with it. This whole scene took five hours.
Cue today’s topic:
Keep Moving Forward
That’s my favorite quote at the moment. If you’re into animated films, “Keep Moving Forward” is part of a quote from Walt Disney, made popular by the animated movie called Meet The Robinsons. This movie tells a very entertaining story about persistence.
Here’s a clip from the film:
That’s not all. Just yesterday, I read a great post called Keep Showing Up. I watched the videos posted there (one of TED, one from Letterman) and enjoyed my stay at Joyful Days (cool blog). The topic there is on the same target as the topic of this post. But I can’t help but think what would’ve happened if the whole idea of persistence wasn’t fresh in my subconscious mind from what I’d read. Would I have given up on my computer? Who knows, but I do know that I’m glad I didn’t and I’m glad I read that post.
I’ve said this on a previous blog, and it still holds true today so I’ll say it again. “We have all had a problem at one time or another that kept us from getting from point A (current situation) to point B (goal). Of course we took some time to address that and figure out a solution. But why, even with our awesome plan, did we never reach that goal? I’ll tell you why. It’s because you gave up.”
You will fail many times but if you allow that to stop you from trying, you will miss out on the amazing feeling of success once you reach new heights with your accomplishments. Failure is a stepping stone to success.
http://zenhabits.net/2008/05/a-letter-to-my-son-on-starting-out-in-life/
Imagine what would happen if the people in this world who have accomplished great things would have just given up! No more light bulb. No cars. No space travel. No pretty white apple laptops. No civil rights. No freedom. You get the picture?
The difference between a person who reaches their amazing goals, and a person who doesn’t, is persistence. You do want to reach your amazing goals right? Me too.
When life throws you a blue screen of death, keep moving forward.
More videos please! Ok, coming right up: