2007 — 23 June: the days are just packed
There's yet another inch or so in the non-pond...
Today's expotition... department
Let's see what the bright lights of Eastleigh have to illuminate, shall we? There's a lot to be said in favour of returning to normalcy. (Or should that be "normality" — where's a dictionary when you need one?)
Stay on the lookout for a photo of Boris the Spider. I haven't yet loaded the picture from the latest digital "film" but he was ever so sweetly guarding our front door last night when we went out for a dusky stroll after 9 o'clock.
Technology? Pah!
Well, that was a miserable adventure and a quarter. The new 1TB drive abso-positively refused to allow itself to be reconfigured as RAID1. It was delivered as RAID0 by default, and my other choices were the delicious "JBOD" and to have it as a pair of unspanned drives. So I've opted for the latter. Then it was two hours or so to copy all the MP3s across from the HP PC's USB-attached "MyBook" via the network, and another hour to copy the same data from drive 1 to drive 2 inside the new box. So I was getting about 1GB/minute across the network and about twice that more locally. (I assume the data still had to whizz up and down the Firewire800 cable and traverse the iMac in some way.)
The new drive is also not as quiet as I'd like, though it's nothing the noise-reduction circuitry of the Sennheiser headphones can't handle. But I think I'll be able to cut noise levels simply by burying it behind some books, frankly.
And Boris?
I'm afraid the non-flash was too dark and blurred, and the flash was too bright and blurred. And now, of course, there's no sign of him or his little web.
I was more successful in The Works however, and (earlier in the week) in what used to be Ottakars but is now a rather ordinary-seeming Waterstone's:
- The life and times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson (half-price in Waterstone's)
- Roosevelt & Churchill: men of secrets by David Stafford. This has already thrown cold water on one of the fine, and oft-repeated, anecdotes1 about the nature of their relationship
- Isherwood by Peter Parker; I guess Christopher Isherwood is about as different from those two national leaders as it is possible to be, though he might well have been one for flitting between their bedrooms!
Bedside reading, however, is still the new Richard Dawkins, though I've only a few pages left. Marvellous book.