2008 — 13 Mar: Thursday, and I hate Windows!
Just a placeholder, but I don't expect I'll change the day's main heading somehow. We shall see.
Here we go again
It's now 09:56 and nearly seven hours since Morpheus claimed me. Not actually raining, or blowing. I drifted off to an article asking whether Linux was becoming too fragmented — it seems lots of eye candy and "bling" is not helping as the GUI tries to keep up with the slick appearance of the latest OSX and Vista. I do wish more fundamental aspects were given higher priority. My own tussles with operating systems go back to GEORGE II and III on ancient ICL 1900 Series mainframes and I long ago formed the opinion that they tend to take far more system resource than is good for them. Don't get me wrong: I'm not a big fan of the command line interface in a terminal window either...
I remember finding Stephenson's article well worth reading, if only for sections with titles like "Morlocks and Eloi at the Keyboard". And for paragraphs that resonate very loudly in the period following a PC crash:
Anyone who uses a word processor for very long inevitably has the experience of putting hours of work into a long document and then losing it because the computer crashes or the power goes out. Until the moment that it disappears from the screen, the document seems every bit as solid and real as if it had been typed out in ink on paper. But in the next moment, without warning, it is completely and irretrievably gone, as if it had never existed. The user is left with a feeling of disorientation (to say nothing of annoyance) stemming from a kind of metaphor shear — you realize that you've been living and thinking inside of a metaphor that is essentially bogus.
The sensations of disorientation (and loss, of course) are surprisingly similar on some levels to those of becoming a widower, believe me!
Speaking of loss, it seems niece #3 actually had her copy of that paperback edition of Lord of the Rings stolen from a London storage facility1 a few years back and (according to her mother) "She has not known how to tell you this — and spent a lot of time looking in second hand book stores.... with no success." So the experience was not without its compensations. Neither party seems to have grasped the fact that the book was a gift, not a loan. Either that, or I habitually presented such a grumpy old Uncle command line interface that they misunderstood.
Water dripping on stone... dept.
My reader (if she's still reading) is probably old enough to remember Felix Dennis, one-time defendant in the Oz magazine "school kids issue" trial that permanently cracked the UK Establishment's façade of sensible wisdom and superiority, in my eyes at least. Mr Dennis (who was given a lesser punishment at the time on the grounds of his lesser intelligence!) has gone on to become a multi-millionaire publisher and poet. A small part of his business empire is still trying to get me to resubscribe to MacUser magazine, with no success so far:
I was particularly tickled by the fact that the letter carries tomorrow's date.
A timid knock on the door...
... thankfully heralds the arrival of the HDD enclosure, and thus allows me now (10:52) to get out and about on further tasks for today. Since brekkie has just been sent on its way, this is goodness. I need to get the Mr ERNIE Special Delivery off, and the card and letter over to Val in Sweden who is so far unaware of Christa's death. Plus, I owe the milkman of the last quarter of a century a brief note about my domestic re-arrangements hereabouts. And those forgotten apples. Then, before you can draw breath, it will be lunch time, followed by a bit more data recovery before the evening's attempt to repair XP. (I foresee acquisition of another internal SATA drive in my near future, too.)
Somewhere in there is an afternoon cuppa and a cake with my main co-pilot, too. Phew, I'm exhausted.
Posting done. By the way, Christa, "our" P.O. is on the move to Fryern, complete with its current staff. The fact that "our" Domestic Appliance Repair shop and "our" Letting agent have either vacated or are trying to vacate the adjacent premises makes me suspect yet another block of flats will be rising all too soon now. I can still remember when the Repair place was a most useful video rental outlet and the Letting place was a most useful stationers. Over 20 years ago; well over 20 in fact. Good grief! Oh well, off I trot again. I've also been told by another reader — more familiar than I with the Second Law of Thermodynamics — to stop trying to tidy my study. Would that I could use the Sherlock Holmes filing system...
Wait! This is too good to miss:
In the film, scientists invaded the Creature's peaceable kingdom; so naturally he saw them off. In the film he also fell in love with Kay Lawrence (Julia Adams), a comely young woman scientist in a white swimsuit, whom Mr Chapman much enjoyed carrying round in his brawny, scaly arms. The Creature's urge to mate was understandable. He was the last survivor of the fish-men, just as Mr Chapman turned out to be the last in a line of sad-monster-players that stretched back through Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, before more heartless and mechanised species arrived in Hollywood.
It would be a strange man who did not recall the shots of that comely young woman swimming in initially blissful ignorance of the Creature from the Black Lagoon...
It's not just me... dept.
We're back, and we're feeling fixed-ish
It's now 20:27 and I'm recently back from Brian's ham radio shack carrying, as far as we could tell, an HP PC that has now been successfully restored to its original factory default state, but with all the user (that's me, folks) data and applications that I've been putting on to it intact.2 I actually have to repeat the registration and activation exercise, as it's in a truly primeval state. I also need to re-fetch every security "improvement" that Microsoft has published since October 2006 (when Christa and I first lugged the blessed thing home from John Lewis in West Quay). Restoring XP from the protected recovery partition took just over an hour. During this process, it also ran CHKDSK to find, and apparently fix, precisely six errors, in precisely one part of the disk: the Thunderbird email subdirectory that got clobbered. The Windows subdirectory that had been marked as unreadable, and had thereby rendered the machine brain dead, has been silently resurrected.
So, fingers crossed (and certainly before I let it loose on my home network, let alone the Interweb thingy) I shall once again suck all the data off it, and then we shall see what sort of state it's really in. Curiously, it no longer looks as if it's an XP Pro Media Centre 2005 edition. Indeed, it looks for all the world like a bog standard (choosing my phrase carefully) XP Pro system. Do you suppose the HP engineers forgot, and installed a basic system into their protected recovery partition? Doubtless there will turn out to be something you have to click, or something I forgot to click, somewhere along the way. Gosh, isn't this better than watching broadcast TV? Well, they do say pensioners should try to keep their cerebral cortexes ticking over...
Thanks for your moral and technical support, Brian.
Taking a break from gently persuading the HP PC back towards a degree of usefulness, I see that the BBC home page has reverted to normal, so here's one of those graphics that I always find so deliciously meaningless.3 I wonder what Professor Tufte would make of it?
