My hard drive started to die so I powered off the computer and ran away. I’ve been using the lappy for months while I chose a superb, fast, reliable replacement drive. I got it yesterday (sent in a JIFFY BAG!!) and plugged it all in. It’s a SATA drive wot has a million advantages over the old newly-obsolete ATA or EIDE, one of which is not that my motherboard requires a PCI card to control it. This was the reason it took me months to buy it, cos I went right up the scale of “hmm, need new MoBo then… OK, need new CPU and Memory…” etc, before calming down and realising that my technology habit was going to threaten my ability to ever own a house of my own.
The plan was:
- install SATA card and drive
- install windows to new drive
- reconnect dying drive and transfer important data before it croaks
This went fine until I found that reconnecting the old drive caused the machine to refuse to boot.
Poo.
I dived into my pile of dead computers and resurrected one with a modern enough MoBo to support the 80gig source drive, and powered it up. Windows XP ran pretty smoothly though it refused to spot the USB mouse.
Unfortunately, it also required me to activate windows online before logging, which it wouldn’t do because it couldn’t see its network card, which I couldn’t reconfigure because I couldn’t log on.
Poo.
Picked up a handy 2Gb disk with damnsmalllinux on it, and slapped it in as primary drive. Suddenly I can talk to all my data and the network! Yay!
But I don’t have any way of sharing the files, and it’s now 0:30. So we leave this exciting multi-parter on a cliffhanger.
The morals are:
- back up your data before you need to restore it
- keep your previous computer
- always have a small linux distribution with samba or ftpd handy
Those of you who’ve commented recently will notice that you now have to register. Don’t worry, I’m not harvesting your email addresses for later sale to eastern european organ-traffickers or anything, I just saw a checkbox in wordpress’s config that said “Users must be registered and logged in to comment” so I checked it. [ Rich notes that this ends up sending you your password in plain text in email. sorry about that I will fix it forthwith ]
I’m still getting spam from non-registered sources. So it looks like I’ve penalised the legitimate posters without preventing the illegitimate. Well done on THAT one, wordpress.
Made my first Sunday roast for years yesterday. It was a qualified success. Corn-fed chicken has a slightly pungent flavour so I won’t be getting that again, and I didn’t manage to get my prize winning roasties right. The biggest problem was the fact it was getting cold by the time it was all served. Steve, Suzanne and Emmie agree that I should practice more. Yum.
Sunday was also great weather for digging a pond at Kim’s place. But we did it in the pissy rain on Saturday. That was great fun too, real playing in the mud stuff. We ended up with a team of 8, which was just perfect, two in the hole digging, two clearing stuff out into buckets, two taking the buckets and slinging the muck onto the pile, and two making tea and spotting when we’re going to dig up a bit we wanted to keep…
What hypocrisy!
I’d like to see regime change here in the UK. I’m not convinced a change of government is enough though.
I continue to be amazed by the girls in salsa. I can bang out long sequences of moves and they stick to me like glue, for the most part. Generally towards the end of the night I start getting a bit experimental and things can go a little rough at the edges.
Claire must have the quickest mind of the lot and we have a lot of fun adding a layer of goofing off on top of the dancing. Last night must’ve taken the cake though. God knows where we got the idea but she and I share the concept of “sumo salsa” whereby we strike the sumo pose and stomp our feet, for no other reason than we can. Last night I led her in a few moves, then cast her away and struck the sumo pose. Quick as a flash she matched it and then we went back into partnerwork. A bit later I thought I’d turn it up a gear: repeating the throwing-away move, I struck the pose again and she matched it. Then I attacked!
I have to believe that I let her win.
On the way into town yesterday I was walking behind a big burly shaven-headed guy who was with a little mousey, pecky-looking girl. His sweatshirt read “On Stud Duty”, which bemused me somewhat. I’d almost got used to the “fancy a fcuk?” type of t-shirts which, while being a long way from any good, at least require the teeniest weeniest bit of brain power to notice that it doesn’t actually say a rude word, but instead refers to a well-known british ‘fashion’ store. Is it Burton? I can’t remember…
Fcuk suffers from the same problem that greeting-card manufacturers and bumper-sticker makers do: The idea is to do something individually expressive, preferably in a witty and novel way, and to do this in mass-produced form. What you end up with is “When God made men, SHE was only joking!!!!!!!” - i.e. what starts off as a potentially subtle joke needs bolstering (in this case with bold and with exclamation marks) so that you’re sure the browsing customer has got it.
A guy in the pub last night had “I’d fcuk me” across his chest. Sigh.
In one of those 50-quid-for-a-trackie-top-like-you-paid-5-quid-for-in-1992 shops I saw a sweatshirt with the slogan “SEX SELLS”. I quite liked that: you couldn’t tell whether it was protesting or celebrating it, and raised the question: how does he know? Below the fold however, was the tagline “…and I’m a top seller!”. Sigh.
I’ve half a mind to start a cafepress shop with a bnch of slogans like Stu’s excellent “Common as mcuk”…
- stupid ccok
- slogans scuk
- rbubish in bed
- no fuccing klue
- thick as a brcik