2010 — 21 November: Sunday
Lesson number one:1 don't switch on BlackBeast too far ahead of older slowcoach as that way lies the road strewn with failed network drives. And, of course, on one of those drives live these files.
So, if there's a "Sunday" entry visible today, my cunning reconnect stratagem has worked. Tea, Mrs Landingham, quickly!
Pontif(f)ication can be fun...
In addition to this astonishing volte-face by the planet's infallible pontiff...
... there are scurrilous tales circulating about the defecatory habits of arboreal ursines, not to mention allegations that the pope is a Catholic! "Blanket ban", heh? Before you know it, there will be free condoms in our overcrowded prisons, too. Or is this a cunning recruitment ploy to boost church income?
Time to pack a lunch and find my boots. Fresh air beckons.
Later! Much later...
I did notice that Mike had neatly deflected my one question about the length of today's walk. That, and the fact that we'd decided to go, as it were, for a later kick-off, followed by a reviving cuppa at his place, and a nice hot bath back here, means it's now 17:05 and I'm back in the Dark Ages. But in time, at least, to catch Jarvis Cocker's "Sunday Service".
As a result of our conversational rambling over our 8.1 miles or so hereabouts...
... he's now in the process of re-booting and updating the Windows 7 Pro system he installed on a new quad-core system last December, and I'll be removing the two 1TB drives from BlackBeast and completely re-installing my own system from scratch.
The game plan in Mike's case is to see whether my youthful enthusiasm for this system is justified. My own plan is to stop Win 7 from grabbing and hiding a reserved partition on one of those drives, to give me a fighting chance of setting them up as a RAID1 pair. Plus (I blush to admit) I've learned a lot by trial and error in the last couple of days of footling around with various settings. I must have been mad to think the initial installation would be perfect from Day 1, I guess.
Having taken the necessary...
... deep breath2 — preceded by copying off the dozen or so items I'll be needing to re-install from BlackBeast onto a shared drive on my XP Pro system — I've unplugged the two 1TB drives, pondered awhile on whether or not it would be safe to disable one of the two large cooling fans (and decided not to risk it just yet), formatted the 320GB system drive, and am now "Installing Windows..." yet again. It's 18:24 and is now in the throes of its first restart. Accompanied by Brian Eno's new album on Stuart Maconie's "Freak Zone". Absolutely perfect music to watch bits drift by by, as it were.
Nearly time for my evening calories. Nearly finished the "first-time scan" by the MS Security Essentials stuff. It's very sad that this stuff is necessary, of course, but the only really secure PC on any network these days is one that's powered off, unconnected, and buried about ten feet down in a remote, unmarked field. Preferably inside a locked Faraday cage. It's 18:51 and that distant rumbling sound is my empty tum. Or tea sloshing around inside it. Scan completed on 66657 items, and not one of them is any of my data (of course). Now to venture back into the world of security updates, I suspect.
Yep. Despite the assurance from the Security component that no action was needed, clicking Update from within IE8 reveals 52 updates and 146.5MB of gorp to bring down. Definitely time to go and eat. [Pause] Yum, that's better. Right, I've just powered down and back up to ensure all is copacetic (my belated thanks to a chap named Shane MacDonald back in the mid-1980s for the use of that word) before I switch off again, and then wake it up with 2TB of fresh discs — when I've finished researching RAID 1 setup, that is.
Win 7 is now taking its ease, sprawling over 24.6GB of the boot drive...
Wasn't it a young fella called Bill Gates who asserted, many years ago now, that 640KB of RAM would be enough for anyone? Hence the crappy addressing capability of MS DOS?
That's quite enough computing for today. I have a video date with "Powder Blue" and, should that fail to entertain, I also now have a magnificent DVD set of the "Alien" quadrilogy with a staggering amount of "extras" to be delved into. Thank you, Michael!
Needless to say...
... my subconscious knows me far better than I do. Having failed to become enthralled by the blue powder, I typed one simple search string into Mrs Google, read the first hit, did what it said, and the result was a celebratory croissant and supper cuppa to the musical choices of Guy Garvey while I contemplate a successful RAID 1 setup...
I've had to sacrifice 100 MB or so on the second drive3 as Windows simply refused to let me delete, shrink, or do anything at all to the reserved space it had grabbed in its previous lifetime. And the mirrored drives have to be exactly the same size, of course. Let's hope I never have to find out how to deal with a drive failure. Mostly because I'm not quite certain I know which data drive is which :-)