2010 — 15 December: Wednesday
As I said yesterday, I'm no more paranoid than the next clueless citizen / subject. Having downloaded the next batch of ten "important" security updates for the 64-bit Win7 on BlackBeast I also updated the Security Essentials signature files and did the usual "quick" scan. 31 seconds and 65,267 objects later the "all-clear" sirens have sounded. Just to compare, on the XP system the equivalent scan took five times longer to inspect over 40,000 fewer objects. It would seem (perhaps naively) that the newer system is (or considers itself1 to be) rather more vulnerable.
Reasoning: I've only installed a handful of applications on it, all long tried and trusted. Many more have accumulated on the older machine in the 30 months or so since I last formatted its drive and re-installed XP on it. Since the "quick" scan only inspects the Windows drive, including (of course) the tar pit known as the Registry, the comparison seems fair to me.
Time to move on
Funny though it may be, I sourly observe that the glass collection guys have shown up some 12 hours after I decided they weren't going to and fetched my little crate back inside the locked side gate. Typical.
The second cuppa is already stewed, it's 09:15 and the sun seems to be shining, though it's not yet appeared over the roofs of the houses. The car is thinly coated. The heating system is keeping me comfy. Time for breakfast and then on with the show.
Cold outside...
Nearly as chilly as a charmless charity called "Common Purpose". I'd never heard of it, which is probably just as well for the sake of my blood pressure. Its detractors describe it as "a political charity using behavioural modification". Sounds about right to me. I'm getting too old for this sh1t. But my motto (if I had one) would still be "live and let live" with a side order of "think for yourself". I suspect far too many disagree.
Mencken springs again to mind: "The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic" — not that I'm suggesting Julia Middleton is anything of the kind. I'd never heard of her, either, until reading comments made about the BBC Trust's latest agonised self-appraisal of its supposed purpose. What a deliciously sheltered, blinkered existence I lead :-)
I'm off for some fresh air. I obviously need to clear my head.
Back for a quick pit stop
Walking briskly past the West Quay "car park full" signs an hour ago I suppose I should have expected Soton to be a heaving mass of humanity (or, at least, of my fellow human beings) but I was sufficiently deterred by the length of the queue in dear Mama's choccie shop to dodge it. Still, I got the latest issue of Word magazine, though I was faintly dismayed when my light conversational gambit, offered to the chap who'd picked up his copy two seconds before me — "Aah, a fellow addict" — brought only a ferocious glare.
Nowt so queer as folk, heh?
I also allowed myself to be persuaded by an enthusiastic young sales chap in "Waterstone's" — whom I'd eavesdropped on, while he extolled the virtues of Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian to a young lady browser2) — to try the same thing, and subsequently got an approving smile from the young lady womanning the till. I usually regret these selections.
Quick snack and I'll be off again. My playmate across the road has a streaming cold, so he's confined to barracks, poor lad.
Xmas is early for BlackBeast
I'm giving him3 the universal card reader I overlooked when buying the original barebones bits'n'pieces and an external 1.5TB SATA drive to do all the backing up rather more speedily than USB2 can manage. When I returned from Novatech, skirting most of the nasty cold wet stuff falling out of a spectacularly dull grey sky, I also had yet another "upgrade cheaply to the latest Acronis Home Image software" offer. By clicking busily around their website I didn't take too long to collect their Xmas coupon, either, which I used to knock 30% off the cost of the add-on module that knows about dynamic disks.
Think of it as the birthday present I can't give you tomorrow, Christa. After all, I wasn't gently pestering you to drive me down there, was I? I'm very glad indeed I learned to drive — not to mention you giving me a new car as my final birthday present (!) — even though I would vastly prefer still to have you here as my lovely chauffeuse. Inexplicably,4 you seem to be on a horribly extended leave of absence :-(
I owe myself...
... a little victory jig (two in two days!). I've just sent a couple of youngsters from "Scottish Power" on their way, somewhat crestfallen. They were calling on me (as a "privileged customer") to tell me all the good things they could do for me if only I wasn't in the process of spurning them in favour of a rival supplier: e-on (details here). Being reasonably savvy (despite my carefully-cultivated day to day air of domestic ineptitude) I asked them in and lured them conversationally along for a while before playing the Ace of Trumps and taking the game. They reckoned they could get my bill down by £200/year (for combined gas and electricity, monthly direct debit, online, paperless management — all things I'm doing or fully aware of already; you'd think they would know that, surely?). "That's nice," said I. "And the remaining £270/year price difference?"
I fear they also had to listen to my brief lecture on the idiocy of a civilised country privatising vital infrastructure elements such as power, water, phones, and public transport. Tea, Mrs Landingham? Yes, why not. Then I shall integrate the add-on Acronis module with the just-installed base program. Good job I still had the unlock key for the ancient version I last used in 2005 as what I downloaded today demanded proof of previous ownership. Thank goodness it didn't demand to see its predecessor actually in action (as it were).
Crikey. Despite having downloaded 260MB of Acronis gorp mere hours ago, both components separately insisted on updating themselves before proceeding to do purportedly successful backups of my Windows partition and that subset of my "dynamic" data (not including the 200+ GB of music files) that I don't already have backed up elsewhere. Maybe that explains the crash of Windows Explorer (first time that's happened on BlackBeast — to its credit) and the three reboots so far this afternoon? Can we say "temporary system instability"? I know that both components of Acronis have to have matching build numbers but you'd think a competent programmer would find some way of making the updating an atomic (either both or neither) process, surely?
Actually, the trickiest part of the whole process5 was putting the hard disk drive enclosure back together having stuffed it full of an empty 1.5TB drive. Another Western Digital green caviar, as it happens. Right! That's quite enough PC stuff for the evening. It's 19:02 and I'm now going to read my new book while I digest my evening meal. The book's got off to a cracking start, I must admit.
Well, that's a new one
Shutting BlackBeast down for the night produced "Operations are in progress. The machine will be automatically turned off when they are complete" or some such tosh. I resent the dumbing down to the point where I can't find out what the damned thing is playing at, as it were. G'night.