2010 — 23 November: Tuesday
One day1 I shall find out what's good about getting up early on a cool morning to go and sit in a dentist's chair. Still, with any luck, he'll be able to finish pouring concrete into the root he excavated a while back and all will be well in time for my lunch date with Len. Though I refer to him as Dr Fang, his full name should be "Fang Chewy"... not that he's from the mysterious East.
BlackBeast is now quieter than the Gateway PC, though not as quiet as either the iMac (which is switched off) or the little HPC Media PC I use as my intranet web server. And which I haven't rebooted now in more than four months. I must remember to dust it. But not before I've had some breakfast. It's 07:45 and grey out there.
Sadly, although I've been having some unfunny moments during my grapples with Win 7, my main co-pilot (who bought his new PC a week or so before I got my "bare bones" bundle) has somehow managed to pick up some very nasty malware that has done its worst to disable all the simpler ways I could think of repairing the system for him. I strongly disapprove of capital punishment in general, but am prepared to make an exception in the case of the sociopathic scum who unleash this rubbish on us. Carve them up for spare parts, say I. His PC's off to the local repair shop today.
I'm shocked, I tell you...
... to learn that:
Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara said last month it was his belief that "illegal insider trading is rampant" on Wall Street and "the people who are cheating the system include bad actors not only at Wall Street firms, but also at Main Street companies ... Unlawful insider trading ... is an affront not only to the fairness of the market but also to the rule of law."
There's me thinking it was a traditional spectator sport made possible by the assiduous dismantling over the years of just about every form of regulation put in place after the 1929 Wall Street crash. And, by the way, isn't that adjective "unlawful" tautologous?
When a chap's been...
... ever so brave at the dentist all by himself while photosetting composite gunk is poured deep down into an empty root, he has no choice but to swing by Asda on his way back home to pick up three cheap DVDs, and to discover two irresistible CDs (five, in truth) waiting from Mr Amazon on his doorstep:
I await my lunch companion's arrival (though he may well have forgotten again). It's 12:13 and quite brightly cloudy out there — jolly cold, too.
More tea, Vicar?
Well, why not? The day is still only middle-aged. And the tooth is more or less quiescent, thank goodness.
I've noticed, over many years, that...
... Big Bro's new toys tend to be larger than mine, and rather more expensive. This one (the second of six, if memory serves) is due to be delivered to the Ukraine in January:
Bigger than my BlackBeast (but not as fast!)
I stopped playing with planes shortly after I'd staged a magnificent pyrotechnic display of some Airfix models behind the garage back in the mid 1960s. Until dear Mama recently slipped over the edge of the dementia abyss she was firmly convinced I was some kind of pyromaniac. Good job she never found out about the bangers that made excellent torpedoes when they started to fizz. Timing, as in so many aspects of Life, is everything...
It's 17:44, pitch dark out there (time to go close all the upstairs curtains) and having only recently and laboriously tracked down a PDF file of my motherboard manual (with all the crucial bits of BIOS detail that I lacked) I see I still have quite a lot to learn before — you guessed it — my next re-installation of Windows 7 on BlackBeast. Among other things, I am determined to get back the two sets of 100MB stolen from me on the two data drives. I don't need this space, but I mightily resent giving it up.
Brain the size of a gnat
Had I realised how quick and easy it is to unhook the 320GB boot drive, boot from an Ubuntu Live image, run the partition editor program from there, zap the reserved system partition from one of the drives, and then ensure both drives are now once again completely empty and "unallocated" before unhooking them, re-connecting the 320 GB drive, and jumping back into Windows... I would have done it sooner :-) It's a good job I have the soothing rock beats from PlanetRock to keep me cool and calmly collected. I'm going to reset the BIOS and dive into my next re-installation. Good grief, it's 21:07 — where does it all go?
I also have a walk lined up for tomorrow. I think I'll be in need of it by then to clear the addled pate. [Pause] Down the pipe comes yet another set of "important" updates; 42 this time, clocking in at 146.4 MB. Next task will be to check through the large pile of "optional" updates, and install any that look worthwhile. Only then will I re-connect the two supposedly empty 1 TB drives, mirror them, and make sure they behave. Then I can hook up the printer and scanner and reload their 64-bit drivers. And then I can have another bash at networking to my other systems and the data they hold. Chaps need hobbies. It's 22:01 and chaps also need fresh cups of tea. The news from South Korea is as grim as the survival prospects of the 29 NZ miners...
Success! Compare this...
... with last Sunday's feeble attempt! I have regained 0.1 GB of storage.2 And it's only 23:32, too. The night is young. And I also know which drive is which. The upper one (red cable) is Disk 1 and the lower one (blue cable) is Disk 2. Disk 0 is the Win 7 system drive. And gawd alone knows where the latest install has hidden its 100 MB partition this time round. (It's either on the system drive or has had an encounter with a Snark that was a Boojum.)
G'night.