2007 — 24 Apr: Tuesday? No way!
My word, but it can take a long time to backup your data when your mind has been concentrated by the prospect of complete re-installation on the morrow, to paraphrase the good Doctor. And now, at 00:34, it's a bit late in the day to be starting that unfraught process, I guess. Besides, Andy Kershaw is playing us some wonderful Pakistani stuff on Radio 3 at the moment.
Speaking of fraught v unfraught, I should warn you that She Who Must Be Adored has a minor (we hope) health glitch to contend with in the near future, so expect the occasional cuss word and/or contrary opinion hereabouts.
Food for late-night/early morning thought
I stumbled across a new (to me) anecdote about a meeting between Adolf Hitler and Max Planck in 1933, in Thomas Mann's diary:
Planck had requested a personal interview with Hitler regarding anti-Semitic dismissals of professors. He was subjected to a three-quarter-hour harangue, after which he returned home completely crushed.
He said it was like listening to an old peasant woman gabbling on about mathematics, the man's low-level, ill-educated reliance on obsessive ideas; more hopeless than anything the illustrious scientist and thinker had ever heard in his entire life.
Two worlds coming together as the result of the one's rise to power: a man from the world of knowledge, erudition, and disciplined thought is forced to listen to the arrogant, dogmatic expectorations of a revolting dilettante, after which he can only bow and take his leave.
XP re-installation, Take 1
Would I be any the wiser, do you think, if I knew what a "Human Interface Parser" was? All I know (so far) is that my re-installation from within a working XP system fell at the first fence: the one marked Press ENTER to continue.1 So now I'm watching "Setup" reformat completely from scratch, and I therefore also took the opportunity to nuke the Linux partitions on the second drive.
What larks, Pip ol' chum. What larks. At least BBC Radio 3 is soothing the worst of the trepidations. And now that I've downloaded the 74 critical security updates and the 61.5MB nVidia graphics driver and got my hi-res screen "back" and had some soup and a sandwich I'm feeling just about ready to tackle the departure of one of those large, boat-like things due to float past Calshot in about two hours. But, would you believe, my brand new WinXP MFT is already fragmented!
Linux re-installation, Take 1
Let the games commence! Oops. Fell at the first fence here, too. But having had the foresight to jot down the known workaround to the equally known bug in re partitioning it does now seem to be chuntering along creating its ext3 file system in mirabile dictu the (correct) second disk drive. It would have been quite happy to resize and then trample over my new XP but, as I have a spare 300GB knocking around, I felt happier directing it appropriately. I'm trying out Xubuntu 7.04 for the time being, on the grounds that its lightweight windows management might eke out a little more performance. Besides, it's new...
Goodness me, I've just got back from doing the dishes and it's already installed. Now that's more like the "Wow" I need. And it's
left the XP system working, too. Complete with all 79 updates — the extra five all related either to IE 7 or to updates relating to it. Now let's
see if Xubuntu has any updates itself, yet. Somehow I doubt it. Oops. /dev/sdb1 has gone 49,710 days2 without being checked,
check forced. And
Superblock last mount time is in the future. FIXED. My word, trouble right here in River City! Now it reckons it's corrected some errors on the partition but has decided it needs
a restart to clear its head. A touch of the HG Wells, perhaps? And now, it's completely lost the plot as far as my screen resolution is concerned.
Deep unjoy.
And now (of course) I managed to power it off just as it started to do something. Finally! It's actually invited me to login. First move: grab me the nVidia driver, of course. Second: once again find out how to get the full resolution. This is becoming tedious.
Time for a life on the ocean wave
Possible pix to follow... Well, here's a nice seagull to be going on with:
And how's this for the back-end of a sea-going bus?
