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2007 — Day 81 - such jolly fun

You want to know the nicest thing about retirement?

And thus you can spend your morning torn between reading the paper in your jim-jams while chomping contentedly on jam-smeared toast (in bed, natch) or, maybe, cracking open a thick (in multiple senses) set of Linux manuals, or leafing idly through the latest delivery from Mr Amazon:

• The Draco Tavern by Larry Niven — an enjoyable romp. It's nearly 40 years since I read my first collection of his short stories; one of us must be getting older by now!
• Our culture, what's left of it by Theodore Dalrymple. I read this chap's columns in the Spectator. He sees things a little too clearly for comfort, and skewers them neatly for our inspection. Bracing stuff.

While waiting (now happy in the knowledge that those Blackwells elves actually did succeed in unearthing a copy of the Colin Kapp anthology after all) to get your hands on those Unorthodox Engineers. Len, you're restored to "chum" status!

Quitting while you're ahead department

Despite a couple of worrying error messages, a frighteningly vivid red background colour to one of them (think RSOD but without the death!), and no swap space, plus some 6GB mysteriously reported as missing in (in)action before I'd even finished the installation, I seem to have a RAID 1 pair now set up with a working Linux on it once again. At this rate, I shall soon have re-installed Linux more often than I've re-installed Windows — can't believe I've just admitted that.

As a reward for my hard work I then downloaded, but narrowly chickened out¹⁶ of installing, yet another make-your-XP-look-like Vista package on my main Windows PC. Phew, I'm exhausted! But that missing 6GB is nagging at me, as is the certain knowledge that I don't feel comfortable with a server knowingly assembled, as it were, on top of one or more partitioning errors. Plus, I can't believe swap space isn't a Good Thing even with 2GB of memory. More research is needed, I fear.

I predict another round tomorrow. Oh well, Linux: 2, David: nil by mouth.

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Footnote

¹⁶  Just as I got to the end of the small print I noticed that, for the Aero Glass part, it relied on WindowBlinds and it's fair to say I've had more than my fair share of crashes and freezes whenever I've dabbled with that doubtless fine software. I don't blame it, by the way. I recognise the pitfalls of patching system files that are as closely integrated as those making up the user desktop interface must be. I'm just a poor cheapskate who doesn't relish the idea of upgrading (if that's what Vista is) the old-fashioned (that is, expensive) way.