2011 — 22 May: Sunday
I'm currently listening to Randy Newman1 chatting to Bob Harris on BBC Radio 2. But I shall shortly head up those stairs to Bedfordshire, leaving the Gateway PC to its data suckage duties for the rest of the night. Yes, I seem to have managed to get one of my 1TB drives to be seen by XP as a 'basic' disk once again rather than as an 'alien' format. With luck, there's going to be no need to fit the pair of drives temporarily in either XP system as I can use the SATA cradle and that spare 1TB USB drive.
Overnight pause
Well, it's now 48 hours since Blackbeast failed to boot and instead started doing its imitation of a brick, but I've recovered all 72,054 files (288GB) of my 'user' data safely on to that spare drive. I'll also be able to repeat the trick to suck all the system and 'application' data and settings off the boot drive as it's unmodified NTFS. When I've done that, I shall remove the extra 4GB of RAM, restoring the bare bones system to its initial state, and it will then be on its way back to Novatech for diagnosis and repair. I concede there's nothing I can sensibly do here about motherboard breakage.
It's 08:45 on a nice, sunny morning. There's evidence outside of some overnight drizzle. Cuppa #1 is prepared, and a walk will be a'foot (as it were) later this morning. So breakfast, a packed lunch, and some nice pollen-laden fresh air to clear the 'House'- and PC-stuffed head. Good!
Just time for my next photo of Christa, newly-retrieved from the Blackbeast disk:
And off into that fresh air.
Let technological pain...
... be unconfined. Today, Mike's hand-held Garmin GPS (safely out of warranty, probably) signally failed to detect and acquire any satellites. Figuring this either meant a fault, an extreme solar flare, or the opening salvo of World War 3, we fired up my own Garmin dominatrix. She picked up plenty of the little circulating chaps, but her maps are nowhere detailed enough for country footpath walking duties. So we set off using those memory chips home-grown inside our skulls.
Lost? Us? Don't be silly!
Some six miles later we actually rediscovered my car and came back in out of all that nasty fresh air, sunshine, breeze and, at times, spots of drizzle. The afternoon continues :-)
It's been fascinating to listen to Adam Curtis chatting with Jarvis Cocker on BBC 6Music. Curtis (who earlier made the somewhat controversial series "The power of nightmares" — with its thesis being that Western politicians deliberately manipulate our fears to increase their power and control over society) has now moved on to consider computers in a new series starting tomorrow.