2011 — 21 May: Saturday

The best thing about today's date is, if I'm honest, the fact that it's no longer the anniversary of Dad's death for another year. Still, I've just happily gorged myself on another few doses of "House"¹ and will now toddle off to bed for what's left of a good night's sleep. Is that the life, or what? :-)

I'm pleased by the way I've got the Gateway XP PC back up and running, but irritated nonetheless by Blackbeast's failure. Since I put it all together myself, I may be taking it personally. There are also some aspects of Windows 7 that I'd got rather used to, dammit. Oh well. Yawn. G'night.

Not for the first time...

... has my subconscious delivered an answer to me on waking up. I already know a chap with a working PC I can use to fit the pair of "dynamic" hard drives into for my data suckage. And I confirmed this by simply reading the label still stuck to the front of it. It's the Gateway PC I'm using right now, of course. The "320GB SATA HD" contains the clue. Although I bought this system back in 2005, I was more forward-looking than I realised. Not only did it have an early Intel twin-core processor (Pentium D), but it also has a SATA motherboard.

Of course, I'll still have to fiddle around inside it to squeeze in the two drives but, as I said, I'm retired. Actually, given that my full-size HP MPC (Core2 Duo) that IBM so kindly subsidised for me when I retired is a year younger, I now suspect² I'll find its motherboard is also SATA. And its case is just a bit larger than the Gateway's. Choices and decisions. We shall see.

Meanwhile the sun is shining, the second cuppa is now required, and Brian Matthew is playing another batch of excellent music. Cool. I suppose I'd better get dressed... There's also my next crockpot experiment to set up. Where does the time go, I wonder?

Today's mystery object

I love cats, but their fellow-travellers love me, which is why we had to get rid of the pair of toms we had when Peter was a youngster and TVs were only 25" screen size. The photo here (when clicked) shows the first of two drowned specimens I've dealt with so far this morning.

Unwanted visitor

I forgot my usual defensive trick of rolling my socks up over the bottom of my trousers last time I snaffled a cuppa over the road in the bungalow Peter and Shelagh use to house their five cats. My fault.

I have an errand this afternoon. Roger wants me to pop over and inspect his answerphone to see if it can be restored³ to usability. Could be amusing. Right. Time for some breakfast. It's 09:57 already.

Good afternoon

Having just opened up the HP MPC case I can confirm it has at least two spare SATA sockets. Sadly, its case is actually smaller than the Gateway PC. And its innards are so densely packed (and so much internal volume is wastefully set aside for the HP-approved expansion HDD [a USB device, to add insult] in the "Media Bay") that I'm not going to waste any time trying to shoehorn in the two SATA drives. Instead, I shall do what Mike had to do recently when one of his Terastations needed attention, and balance the naked drives temporarily on top of the case of my Gateway machine.

But not before lunch. And this Jim Henson short film made in 1967 for IBM.

I now know I'd forgotten quite how crowded the interior of the Gateway case is, too. <Sigh> Now, about that lunch...

Hours later

As I can now smell the tasty evidence from my crockpot and am starting to wonder when I can crack it open, I've just re-read the excellent essay from which this not entirely representative snippet is extracted:

When each bit was a ferrite core, through which some bleary-eyed human had to string three tiny wires, the reason for the high cost was obvious. (In the mainframe core memory era, I worked for a year on a project which ended up consuming about ten man-years to write a new operating system for a UNIVAC mainframe machine solely to avoid the need to buy another half-megabyte memory module. This made a kind of bizarre economic [if not strategic] sense, since all of the salaries of the implementors added up to far less than the memory would have cost.)

John Walker in Memory Is Tough

I still recall persuading the chap I was writing software for in the Haymarket magazine empire to buy a memory upgrade in the late 1970s for the ICL 1500 Series machine I'd also persuaded⁴ him to buy. In that way, I could leave assembler-level code behind and use a — somewhat — more productive language. While I greatly enjoyed the lower level coding I have to admit I was a lot more productive with that extra 24KB of RAM.

Footnotes

¹  Nearly reaching the half-way point of Season #5.
²  "How could he possibly not know that?" you might reasonably ask. The truth is I hate fiddling around inside these toys, preferring to add stuff externally and just letting the dust accumulate. It's a mild phobia I can date back to the PC Shuttle Christa bought for me in late 2002. Every time that needed attention I had to strip it right down and I clearly recall that was a job best tackled by a chap with three or four smaller hands than the two I'm fitted with. I got into bad habits :-)
³  I employed an extremely arcane technical diagnostic process (lifting the receiver to hear no dial tone) followed by a systematic unplugging and replugging of each connection in turn in the wondrous tangle by his windowsill. Normal service is now restored.
⁴  The ICL salesman had already tried to get him to spend £60K or so when I knew he could do what he wanted to for under £10K. That was my first exposure to the rather seamy commission-driven marketing side of the industry I worked in for 32 years.