2011 — 23 May: Monday

I'm listening to some nice Baroque music1 while waking up with my initial cuppa and checking the route to take down to Novatech after my breakfast. Can you believe, I actually found the sales invoice within 10 seconds or so of looking? For me, that's quite something. Watch this space.

Last night's entertainment was a neat little 'Indie' feature called "Coffee Date" followed by a dose or three of "House". And this morning's nice memory2 is another photo of Christa and Peter from what you could call my "wheelbarrow" series:

Christa and Peter

Shooting my son and heir into the sun and out in the fresh air was always going to be a tricky exposure :-)

So far...

... so good. Blackbeast's repairs are all under warranty, unless the fault turns out to be with the system hard drive, which is the only bit of kit that didn't come from Novatech in the first place. It's a Hitachi 320GB Deskstar SATA drive that cost a helluva lot less than I paid for a 4.3GB Deskstar for my Acorn RiscPC back in the days when IBM still made the drives. Mind you, that drive failed within six months, but I'm rather hoping problems have been ironed out by now :-)

Mike has very kindly agreed to sell me one of his surplus Buffalo Terastation devices, so I took the opportunity of grabbing another matched pair of 1TB drives. I have it in mind to use RAID1 this time, which (I naively believe) will give me 1TB of network storage with triple redundancy. If all four drives let me down simultaneously, I shall "scweam and scweam until I'm thwick" as (I believe) Violet Elizabeth Bott was wont to threaten in a "Just William" book

It's getting gloomier out there, and is both cloudy and windy. I have some supplies shopping to do, and another chocolate delivery to make to dear Mama over in the care-home this afternoon. Apart from that, I'm as free as a bird. It's 11:18. What's next, Mrs Landingham? [Pause] Supplies obtained and lunch will shortly be prepared and ingested. It's (mysteriously) already 12:49.

Rather later

I'm finding it easier just to listen to the Adam Curtis programme than to watch the accompanying kaleidoscope of images. Meanwhile, having just made my second complete data backup from the Blackbeast disk I'd converted back to 'basic' format, I'm now in a position to hand four matched drives over to Mike for him to configure in the Buffalo. He's (sensibly) persuaded me to opt for two 1TB RAID1 systems rather than a single one, and set up a chron job to backup incrementally from one set to the other at 3 a.m. or so once a day. Sounds like a plan to me.

Meanwhile, dear Mama remains in a shrinking mental world of her own. Fascinating in its own way on some level. She continues to recognise me, but does not remember my name or understand our relationship. Most odd.

  

Footnotes

1  BBC Radio 3, Christopher Hogwood.
2  The shirt she's wearing in this, and quite a few other photos, used to belong to me. Dad brought it back for me from a business trip he made over to North America in 1965. I was pleased she gave me a good reason not to discard it.