2011 — 27 July: Wednesday
Destination? New Alresford.1 The weather is moderately dull grey out there (unless it's my decades-long accumulation of grunge on the windows) which is in some ways ideal walking weather. Breakfast and a second cuppa first, of course. It's 09:11 and counting.
I've just been temptingly offered an SSD on loan to see if I can boot from it. I no longer doubt that I can, but — actually — I also no longer think that it's something I necessarily want to do just yet. There are many interesting points both 'pro' and 'contra' elegantly discussed here that have given me major pause for thought. They have quashed, for the time being, the vague plans I was harbouring. But a small, fast fifth drive just for system paging and transient data is still a thought now that I've unearthed that fifth SATA port on BlackBeast's motherboard... (Besides, there's still that tempting spare PCI-E slot for a non-boot SSD data drive, too.)
I also have to admit, given my experience to date with the latest spin of Ubuntu, that I can't help thinking it would be quite something to see it running on BlackBeast with four more processor cores and six more GB of RAM available to it.
Time to pack a lunch and be on my way. Quack, quack.
The laundry is...
... laundering, the bod is showered, the tea will shortly be brewed, and I will then toss a coin to see if dear Mama gets her next ration of chocolate this afternoon, or tomorrow. Brian enjoyed the butterfly-spotting aspects of our little ramble, and was unaware of the pleasant walk along the river. A mere 5.5 miles, but seemingly all uphill. Most enjoyable. It's now 14:18 and the afternoon is my oyster, as it were. Can't say it's bright out there, but at least it isn't the awesome 104F that my friend Carol reported two days ago from her village on the Hudson 20 miles north of Manhattan. (Still, at least she's fitted air-con since family Mounce's visit in 1996.)
Explain these, then...
Well, the one on the left was recommended to me by niece #3. The one in the middle is a secret agent animated series I'd never heard of, but its premise looked OK. The one on the right (a Ken Loach film that had somehow eluded my radar) was a duplicate purchase by Brian last Sunday at the car boot sale, so he's kindly passed it over to me.
Now I'm going to dip my Win7 toes into the wonderful world of Wubi to see how Ubuntu behaves alongside Windows 7 on BlackBeast. I may be gone for some time :-)
[Pause... and several hoots of derision]
Oh dear. It seems that whoever ported Wubi to Python hit a glitch that Python (and/or Wubi) has in dealing elegantly — or indeed, at all — with empty storage devices (link). So even when I'd clicked repetitively (as advised) through about ten identical instances of the "no disk" error messages popup I merely ended up at the same Live CD "demo or install" choice that I would expect to see if I'd simply rebooted with the CD in my drive in the first place. So much for the wonderful world of Wubi, it seems.
Nice idea, but I've not yet managed to get it to work. And my first attempt was over three years ago when Ubuntu 8.04 was shiny and bright and full of promise. As was I, of course.