2010 — 13 November: Saturday
Off to a (Jo) Good start1 at 07:19 or thereabouts. Managed to avoid tripping over the new black beast (I'm going to need a better name than that for my next-gen PC workhorse) en route to the cuppa factory. And have already demolished half a delicious grapefruit.
Haven't we seen this wriggly story before? (A year ago, to be more precise. Talk about making a meal of it. Or should that be a mealy grub? Earlier incarnation here.)
Now here's an unstunning piece of logic presented as factoid news. Source and snippet:
The study by NCIN found that people whose cancer was detected at an emergency stage were more likely to be die [sic] within a year than those whose illness was discovered earlier.
You don't say?
Bopping along...
... to the reliable tunes played by Brian Matthew in his "Sounds of the 60s" — they really don't write them like that any more (which, in some cases, is a jolly Good Thing). The morning remains grey out there (at 09:13) but still dry. My crockpot awaits only the addition of the stock, and breakfast is on the way in. Next: the packed lunch.
Thanks, Mr Postie — he's just dropped off the 3-Blu-ray extended edition of "Avatar"...
... I'm assured the wealth of documentary stuff is well worth watching. It had better be, given the bum-numbing running time.
Later
A pleasant six mile ramble in the New Forest in the vicinity of Exbury and Lepe but avoiding most of the muddy fields. Next order of business: ingest a cuppa, while soaking the carapace in hot water and while also doing some laundry and admiring the smells from the crocking pot. Sounds like a good plan. It's 15:23 and greyer out there than it was at the coast.
Later on, I have a couple of further cunning wheezes:
Plan "A": Connect up and fire up the black beast and see what sort of results and/or fun I get after tinkering with the BIOS and then installing desktop Ubuntu 10.10 on what should (on the face of it) be a pretty fast machine.
Plan "B": I've also had a belated brainwave to help me kill a couple of stones with one avian (or something). I can use the nice tall glass and metal bookcase (that Christa bought for her study in early 2007) to fill the remaining bookshelf gap up in the "books warehouse". It's plenty large enough to accommodate four pairs of rows of large books, back to back. This will, in turn, allow me to move one shelf of such books upstairs from the living room and, in further turn, accommodate another row of the CaseLogic folders that I will need to hold the remaining 2,500 or so CDs. Method in my madness, or what?
"But what about the A/V kit currently on this tall bookcase?" I almost hear you ask. Easy-peasy. I shall simply move all the kit back on to the pair of tasty glass and metal shelf units that it was on for the last eleven years or so, and that are currently just cluttering up what was Christa's study. But I shall also keep the heavy new Rotel power amp on the unit that has the plasma screen on it. As long as the power amp is (as it were) out of play, the shelf units are then a lot easier to manage and manoeuvre. Simple!
Later still
Following a bowl of the latest, delicious, crockpot it turns out — with hindsight, I suspect, utterly predictably (of course) — that there was also a
Plan "C": Watch quite a large proportion of the utterly fascinating extras stuff looking behind the scenes of "Avatar". It's 19:47 and time to revert to Plan "A". Listen out for the howls of rage and frustration.
[Pause]
Well, so far, so good. After a wary few minutes working through various BIOS settings of (shall we say?) variable comprehensibility (including one about Core Revealing) I decided to go for it. I just lazily banged in the Ubuntu 10.10 boot DVD that came with "Linux Format" magazine. I'm regarding this first trial very much as a skirmish as (for example) I found nowhere in the BIOS to specify RAID1 and nor am I even certain that I've picked the "right" hard drive to boot from. Nor do I understand why it's identified SATA as SCSI. Still, it began, without fuss, to create an ext4 file system and has now moved on through copying files to downloading packages with 30 seconds left. Of course, whether it correctly picked up the AMD64 build is anyone's guess. Now it's "Installing system". Time for a cuppa, I suspect.
It's not quite as quiet as I would like, but that's an area I can work on at my leisure. Besides, the case is currently pulled out from underneath the desk rather than being tucked away. It's also currently using the Analog video cable as I don't have a spare DVI-D one (Roger had my last one).
Fifteen seconds to login, and about another five to the full working desktop. Not too shabby. Now I'm getting the ATI/AMD proprietary FGLRX graphics driver, so it seems to be fully aware of my graphics card. It's 20:53 and time, I think, to work on my next plan :-)
After downloading and installing 147 updates (120MB). Just like old times. I look forward to seeing how Windows 7 behaves on this system, too. But not just yet.