2010 — 7 December: Tuesday
Disgraceful!1 Need tea... And I shall need to make a start on my crockpot-stuffing soon, too. Nor can man (quite) live by two fresh oranges alone for breakfast, tasty though they were. The daily round resumes. It's still cold out there, too.
Backup a little
Back in June 2007 (just a couple of weeks before we finally learned just how horribly ill Christa was and my world of trivial hobbies was rapidly inverted and put on the back burner) I'd bought (for the iMac) a 1TB external drive. It was an Iomega matched pair of 500GB SATA drives though I couldn't figure out how to "RAID" it. I rather hope there was nothing too valuable on it (apart from spare copies of all my MP3 files) as I've just hooked it up to BlackBeast as my dedicated "Backup and Restore" device and instantly blatted its former Mac format data into oblivion without so much as a "Are you sure you want to do this?"
Since I don't have a Firewire port on BlackBeast I'm restricted to using the USB 2 interface. I'm rather hoping only this initial backup will be quite this slow — I shall be mildly irritated if Win7 doesn't work "incrementally" on its next scheduled backup. But it's only using 10% CPU so it's no biggie. Meanwhile, kitchen duties are calling to me if I want a nice tasty meal later tonight. It's 11:12 and seems a bit lighter out there in the dull grey.
Life's a bit too short...
... to dance with a slow backup system. It's 12:33, the crockpot is heating, and the backup is a mere 27% complete. I think I shall have to investigate an external drive with a SATA port so I can use the e-SATA slot on the back of BlackBeast's case. This is all taking far too long. But Mr Postie has just delivered some early Good Cheer that I shall get to shortly. First, there's the matter of a cuppa and some late lemonses. It's crawled up to a mere -1C out there.
Right. Cancelled it. Inspecting the partial results at least shows that it zips up a series of "lumps" as it were as it trundles along. I shall take another look at Acronis True Image as I have a cheap upgrade path available to me. But not until I've got me a faster interface device. USB 2 just doesn't cut it any longer when trying to handle hundreds of GB.
As a confirmed diehard Twihard I shall enjoy at least one of these films tonight:
Having staved off...
... incipient cabin fever by nipping out with my main co-pilot for a quick cuppa and comestible (at Brambridge) after lunch, I've been working my way through one of an alarming number of external hard drives that have an amazing variety of old bits'n'pieces squirreled away on them. I call this "getting organised". Time for a nice, hot bath before my evening meal and filmic treat(s). It's 17:53 and (of course) pitch dark outside already. Yuk.
And chilly, although I'm almost sure I spotted a tiny bit of blue sky earlier this afternoon.
Oops!
Guess who forgot to chop up an onion for tonight's tasty "stew" (for want of a better term)? Oh, the shame! Too late now, of course. I expect, like Gloria Gaynor, I will survive. KBO.
Eclipsed
Twilight #3 turned out even better than I'd hoped, though it took nearly 5 minutes to persuade my Blu-ray player to recognise the disk as Zone B. I'd had the player set to Zone A (for "Starman") and it took two complete power-off cycles and two applications of the magic "hack", plus playing a burst of "Avatar" (a known-to-be-fine Zone B2). I was beginning to wonder if the disk had been set to Zone C — the only one left for me to try).
Time (23:31) for some sleep. It's -3C out there. Brrr.