2008 — 6 Mar: Thursday, and it's pension day!

It's round about midnight1 and I'm about to start the final cuppa with another episode of Studio 60. I have been concentrating on getting a backup PC system up to speed before I set about repairing (euphemism, I expect, for re-installing) XP Pro on my primary system. Until that time, there will be a noticeable dearth of pictures on the diary as the scanner and image software is on — guess which? — system.

"Bother!" said Pooh

A reminder:

From your hapless webmaster!
I've just sent out an email to the people whose addresses I've managed to rescue from the chaos that is my broken PC. If you know me, and you haven't received an email from me today, please consider sending one to me so I can painfully recreate my missing Address Book entries. Thanks!

David Mounce


Happier news

I just checked the NS&I site. Christa has won yet another £100 from our mutual friend ERNIE. Time I told him about the poor girl, I guess. Now, where did she keep her bonds?

Here we go again... dept.

It's now 08:45 and looking fairly bright. Certainly brighter than I am feeling. Yes, Tom G, I have a wealth of backups scattered around. But none is completely up-to-date (of course). I was only able to retrieve the most recent 178 emails off the server for reasons I can't be bothered to investigate further. Geoff, you're undoubtedly right about my lack of experience in the ways of pay-and-display parking tickets. The 5th March ticket I bought on 4th March was showing time and date of required departure.

I think my short-term recovery strategy will be to extract all the data I can off the hard drive in the primary PC (assuming it works at all) before contemplating my next steps. I don't want any repair attempts to make things worse; it's bad enough knowing that XP has already written a memory dump to the drive... So:

Nuffin' to it, really! Well, in theory. It occurs to me that the HDD in my failed PC is a SATA not an EIDE. How, if I may so phrase it, do I suck that sucker? Hints very welcome. (I've already got a query out on that one to my main man.) Come to that, how do I break into the case(s)? Oh it all makes work for the (non)-working man to do! At least the smells drifting up from the kitchen laboratory are reasonably enticing. Time (13:02) to go down and stir the pot a little, then eat. It will make a nice change from my gloomy reading all about the Windows Recovery Console. It did!

I fully realise Christa would not be any better than I am in this particular situation,2 but it was always immensely comforting to know that she was around to soothe, as it were, the PC-fevered brow in such times of exasperation.

Snail-mail also exasperates

Today's two items remind me of the bit in The "Caine" Mutiny where Willie Keith gets both a commendation and a reprimand in the same docket. Her Maj's Department of Work and Pensions has just told me that "the amount of benefit you receive will change". This is the one year's worth of State Pension that had been going to Christa and that now comes to me in the form of a temporary bereavement allowance. The poor girl was only getting 80% of the full amount, but it seems the September Retail Price Index rose by 3.9% so that's been applied to boost the amount. (Are you listening, IBM pension folk?) That's the commendation, as it were.

The reprimand takes the form of an invitation from the Southampton University Hospitals NHS Trust to "Ms Christa Mounce"... As someone who has recently received treatment at one of our local hospitals, I am writing to ask for your support... they are applying to become Foundation Trusts. I'm afraid they left this invitation a bit bloody late, don't you agree? Plus it seems to hint that their record-keeping may be slightly sub-optimal. (But then, given what's just happened to my primary PC, perhaps I should keep quiet!)

Painting the Forth Bridge... dept.

Many years ago, as a young and innocent3 technical writer, I joined a team of same in IBM Hursley to work on CICS/VS documentation. I was motivated to make this career move by the need to feed, house, and clothe my little family during what, in 1980/81, seemed likely to be the implosion and disappearance of ICL. Pretty smart move, as it turned out. My first IBM manager at the time commented to me that working on CICS/VS documentation was very much like painting the Forth Bridge. (According to urban mythology, by the time you've worked your way across to one end, it's time to start all over again at the other. Actually, I heard a BBC podcast recently that outlined the use of much longer-lasting paint which will mean this is no longer true [if it ever was!], but that's another story.)

Tidying up the study — my current task, as I slice through the archaeological strata of dust (and worse) that impede access to the PCs here — it occurs to me, is something I've now been trying to do ever since Peter and Christa joined me in this house (in October 1981). I returned from a one-week trainee writer's course4 in Germany to a state of domestic entropy that has remained stubbornly high all these years since.

And I've just had a call from one of Christa's colleagues in Germany, who was beginning to wonder why it was so long since he'd had any of his patent work checked by her! It seems inter-office communication is not all it could have been in more places than one. Never mind. Plus Mr Money has just emailed to set up another appointment wherein I can show her bank5 the Grant of Probate again in hopes, this time, that they copy the bloody thing!

  

Footnotes

1  Seems to happen very often, these days.
2  Her unshakeable conviction that I could do anything with PCs was a great boost. Indeed, she was convinced I could basically do anything I put my mind to. My goodness, I miss her!
3  Not completely innocent — I at least had the wit to recognise that the recruitment ad I'd been attracted by was remarkably similar to one I'd helped draft when I was managing the team of writers in ICL.
4  Quite why I had been sent on this course when I'd been an experienced hire is just one of IBM's little ways, I suppose. At least I got a chance to hit the bookshops of Stuttgart, though I also had an interesting time filling in my first-ever IBM expenses claim form subsequently.
5  Mine as well, of course, since our mad flurry of making everything into joint accounts back in September to try to minimise all the hassle we knew the survivor would be facing.