2011 — 28 July: Thursday
Exasperation? It's the obvious response to ten minutes spent1 listening to the BBC's main UK radio news bulletin. The final straw, after items about
- increased civil service pension contributions that won't be paid into a pension fund,
- a history of large-scale IT project failures (the word used about the amount of money dribbled away was "obscene"),
- whether use of English should be mandatory for immigrants joining spouses in the UK,
- protestations of non-involvement in phone hacking by a particularly stupid ex-editor now doubtless making "obscene" amounts of money on US TV, and
- the happy anticipation, expressed by some God-bothering idiot, to be meeting up with some other recently-deceased ditto "in Heaven"
was the revelation that some five-year-olds are turning up at schools not even knowing their own names. There's an argument to be made that we are not the pinnacle of Nature, but rather, the stupidest species so far to strut the planetary stage.
Time for the cup that soothes.
Very nice weather out there, by the way.
Two stunning banalities...
... in a single month? First we had anthropologist Dr Helen Fisher, and her "You really do have to start with the right person." Now, at the end of a magazine article on "Printing in Ubuntu", we have:
Well, I'm glad that's sorted out. [Pause] Unlike my 1.5TB SATA drive. I'm not sure whether the drive itself has failed — it's a Western Digital Caviar Green made just a few months2 ago — or the external case I'd been keeping it in, hooking it up via an eSATA cable. It's now plumbed into the bowels of BlackBeast itself and ought to be getting its power and data connection (yesterday's newly-discovered fifth SATA port) but all attempts to find it from Disk Management, with several "rescan disks" and a reboot or two, have failed so far.
I think I shall have some lunch before I once again take things apart. It's 12:40 and also about time I popped over to the care home with another batch of chocs. What it is to be a dutiful son, heh?
Ho Hum
It's now 18:20. I'm hungry. I'm tired. I'm a bit fed up. And I've sadly managed to prove (by a painful series of elimination tests, each of which seemed to involve taking BlackBeast's case apart) that I'm indeed the unproud owner of a dead 1.5TB SATA drive.3 The only upside is that I've taken apart my other external 1TB hard drive, made the happy discovery that it contains a SATA drive even though the only interface offered by its case was USB, and successfully plumbed it into the aforementioned bowels of BlackBeast (in place of the dead one) in that fifth SATA port.
All I've lost in data is the backed-up system image of the boot drive, and it was about time to take a fresh image in any case. At least, now, the "create system image" process will be a lot speedier than it would have been via the USB interface. There was nothing else on the drive that I don't have a minimum of one further copy of, salted away.
Speaking of failed memory devices, dear Mama has absolutely no recollection of the 30-minute visit by two of her grand-daughters last Friday. She again mentioned her wish to go back to Birmingham to stay with her mother. That would be a very neat trick in the Lazarus of Bethany line.
I was also interested to note that the new 'Ultra' line of SanDisk SSDs is now quoting working lifetime in terms of total amount of data written to a device:
The drives have a 3Gbit/s SATA II interface, not the faster and newer 6Gbit/s SATA III one. They have TRIM and SMART support and a working life defined in terms of the total amount of written data. There can be 40TB of data written to the 60GB product, 80TB for the 120GB model, and 120TB of data written to the 240GB Ultra.
I gather it's all to do with the hidden costs (wear and tear-wise) of rewriting data and erasing memory cells. Perhaps dear Mama could help out?
Sadly...
... this update is coming from my Ubuntu system, whose 'disk utility' confirms persistent (and fatal) I/O errors on the errant hard drive in much the same way as the Win7 disk management on BlackBeast did. Between them they report an unallocated partition of just over 110GB, an unitialised state, and a distinct unwillingness to let me initialise or format either the volume or the drive. Something very rotten appears to have happened to the MBR, but I know not what. In the words of Godley and Creme, on their "Consequences" album, oh, when things go wrong, they really go wrong...
It's 22:11 and I've been losing myself in Volume 3 of the Julian May "Exiles" saga.
By way of a consolation prize I've just disinterred my Audigy "Creative Soundblaster" external soundcard, plugged it into the Ubuntu PC, connected its headphone output to the AudioLab pre-amp (Ubuntu seems only able to operate it as an analogue audio device, even though it's connected via USB) and pointed the Banshee Media Player at some of the MP3 files I keep on my NAS. Audio bliss, though I obviously haven't yet quite got the hang of Banshee's method of building playlists.
However, I think that will do for one night. Mysteriously it's now 23:20 and I'm yawning. G'night.