2010 — 16 December: Thursday
If I need a chilling reminder1 of the passing of Time, today (which would have been Christa's 65th birthday) will do very unnicely, thank you. But "A wandering minstrel" has just started up and made me smile. Good ol' BBC Radio 3. "Am I in sentimental mood?" indeed. Pah! Not since I was a "gentleman of Japan" in the Lower Sixth... though I'm mildly surprised to recall all the words.
It's 08:25 and time for breakfast.
Backups
I received a cri-de-coeur last night from my newest2 lady relative. It appears that we share at least one family trait:
I have just read in your diary that Creative are no longer making the rechargeable batteries for my little Zen.
When John had to have a new computer when he retired, he saved all my music on a CD-R disc. This might have been a mistake as it won't down load onto the new computer
(does it think it's illegal file-sharing?) Is there any way that we can do this as it seems that when my Zen comes to the end of its life I shall lose all my music. Help!
I confess my two immediate thoughts were a) Now's the time for Mike to lend me his T-shirt (the one with a Windows error box saying "No, I won't fix your computer problem") and b) The only times I needed files recovered from backup in IBM they were — every single time — either missing or corrupt (or, conceivably, both, in all probability). This morning's extra thought is "I bet the deadly hand of DRM is in play here."
I replied, in part: "It's a simple rule of Life that you won't need a backup until you do, at which point it won't work. There are any number of reasons the CD-R might no longer be readable, I fear." Of course, I'm now wondering whether those two "tib" files that nestle among the vastness of yesterday's 1.5TB hard drive will actually restore, but I'm too lazy at this point of the morning to test them. I mean, if you can't trust backup software to be error-free, what can you trust? :-)
I gave yesterday's book recommendation a good 100 page try, but I don't think I'll bother any further. A florid re-telling of the supposed truth behind the Dracula legends. There are more pressing concerns, like stocking up for winter siege conditions locally if the BBC forecast can be trusted. It's very grey out there at 10:01 — more of the winter thing, I guess. [Pause] Actually, I seem to be getting a bit better at this "survive on your own" lark. I've just examined various kitchen cupboards and a freezer or two and am OK for the time being. So I can revert to doing whatever it is I do when I'm not doing something else, I guess. That's good.
Meanwhile, next door the poor sod's now got a van from "ChemDry" parked outside and I suppose soaking up and mopping up will be starting. While there's no good time for a house to flood, the middle of winter has got to be a bad time.
Further RAMifications
Back from a little expotition (in nasty cold rain I might add) and after the lunch I'd prepared before I set off, I've now got myself a nice big 16GB USB stick, so I've been able to dedicate an earlier 4GB one to the one spare slot on the back of BlackBeast's case for use in boosting its performance. Oddly, the Win7 help info says the optimum size is supposed to be twice the amount of physical RAM fitted. This ought to be 16GB in my case.
However, trial and error with 4GB, 8GB and 16GB sticks showed that the optimum size Blackbeast said it wanted never exceeded 4096MB, hence my choice of "ReadyBoost" device. It now has all but 5.18MB of an extra 3.73GB for its merrymaking. When I think back to how much RAM I had to play with in (for example) my freelance programming days in the late 1970s, just this "leftover" 5MB was far more than I ever used. Don't even think back to the physical core storage of earlier times in Hatfield before the Polytechnic splashed out on their dec system10 just for me :-)
A little digging brought me to this magical little treasure trove. (Their home page is here.)
Creeping ever nearer
Fibre optic to the home (hereabouts, that is) or, in this case, to the cabinet at the side of the road:
As I move stuff around...
... and sort stuff out, I still find an occasional picture of my Best Girl lurking, as it were, here and there. Case in point:
I took this with Christa's little Minolta on 21st October 2004, when Rachel (the NZ helicopter pilot) was visiting with her delightful husband Harley, though I suspect he was behind me encouraging everyone to smile for the birdie...
The weather currently (20:15) looks pretty grim, but we're going to try to get out for a walk tomorrow. Fresh air and exercise is jolly good for us, you know. Besides, what's a bit of frostbite? Meanwhile Barclays have sent me a couple of further pieces of their PINSentry jigsaw puzzle. But not the most vital bit, which was due today. Such good fun.
Lucy Pevensie has...
... nothing on me! I've been learning some new magic spells too, just as she did in the course of The Voyage of the 'Dawn Treader'. I first threw myself on Mrs Google's mercy, asking "remove EFI system partition" (from drive in Windows 7) and the very first "hit" exactly described my situation:
I have an external HD which used to be my TimeMachine drive. I got a different drive for that, so I want the original drive back as an external on my Windows box, but it has this random 200 MB partition labeled as EFI System Partition. How do I get rid of this?
1. On the command prompt type diskpart and answer to any possible UAC prompt.
2. On the new diskpart prompt, type list disk. Note the Disk ### column.
3. Type, select disk ### (with ### being the partition you wish to delete. Usually partition 0 and with that 200 MB size)
4. Finish by typing, clean
Magic! I'd been vaguely wondering from time to time how to get that TimeMachine drive back into use but never found the round tuit I needed.
But in less good news, the weather forecast has now replaced our sunny lunchtime with light snow showers. Neither of us fancies walking if that's the case. Grrr and Brrr! It's 22:22 and my spy was reporting horizontal sleet in Winchester. I've just looked — it's -2C but dry outside at the moment. [Pause] In better news, I've just ordered a Blu-ray copy of the ineffable Crumb from the Criterion collection. Chap needs an Xmas treat, don't you think?