2011 — 1 August: Monday... rabbits!
Though how it can possibly be a year since the last time August rattled around is pretty mind-boggling.1 I'm meeting up with Iris for lunch, and need to get a few errands sorted out before then.
GMail cleans up after me
Having just emailed a chum with a link to this story. Source and snippet...
Stories surrounding those nights are legion: the dope-fiend projectionist who scratched a CND symbol into a Pearl & Dean army recruitment ad and got the reels in the wrong order at a horror festival; the antics at the gay-themed all-nighters. "We had to try to explain to Serena the cleaner why there were so many used latex gloves on the floor after a lesbian all-nighter," says Giles. "I told her it was a fashion statement."
I was tickled to note that GMail promptly offered me an ad from "London Cleaning Services". There's money in muck.
Driving Miss Data
Some while ago, and in the vicinity of Portchester Castle, I picked up a pair of 320GB WD drives (in external cases) for use with my tiny "Slug" NAS. Sadly, lots of things then started happening in what I'd frankly hoped would be a peaceful retirement (!) and the upshot is I've just broken both one of my fingernails and into one of the cases to find a pristine, very low mileage, IDE drive that should2 do nicely to hold Ubuntu while I "dedicate" the separate (much newer) 1TB SATA drive to my /home partition, thus physically separating data and OS. Always a good idea.
I foresee a comprehensive Linux re-installation exercise in the near future, as some of the advice on moving said /home partition about on an existing system carries scary-looking "Danger, Will Robinson" warnings as apparently you can get awfully lost in (data partition) space. But further fiddling will have to wait until after my lunch date, and — by the look of the weather — a gentle sun-lit riverside stroll-while-we-gossip. Time I set off. TTFN.
My lunch choice was poor, though my lunch companion was as charming as ever. We neither of us had suitable footware, and it was hot, so she followed me back here to admire my weed jungles and to see what I've been doing with the house since her last visit. After tea and a goodly chat I finally resumed "work" on my Linux box. I've now removed the 1TB SATA drive for safe keeping and transplanted its XP boot drive back into it. However, to add insult to this morning's minor injury, I couldn't then even refit the front panel. I am very tired of struggling with PC cases that have no elbow room in them. Time for Plan B. I shall now buy and build myself a mini-BlackBeast just for my Linux adventures. But there's no rush. Tomorrow will do.
Time for my next cuppa. Good grief, it's already 16:05. There ought to be a law.
Shameless self-indulgence
Not only have I just eaten a whole (small) tin of pineapple slices ("Best Before 2009") found in the back of a kitchen cupboard as a late pudding, I've also given in and snaffled the last copy Amazon had of Earl Kemp's "Who killed Science Fiction?" (I mentioned it here, but can sometimes take a long time making up my mind). Mr Kemp worked for many years as part of Advent:Publishers in Chicago. I still regret lending my copy of their edition of Alexei Panshin's "Heinlein in dimension" nearly 40 years ago. Me? Bitter? Perish the thought!
Finally, it's cooling down a little. I had to "water" my porch thermometer while it was in direct line of fire from our nearby star earlier.
Software foibles
When I installed Omnipage 18 OCR a couple of weeks ago I failed to notice that it lays some of the groundwork for the Gladinet cloud storage facility. I hate software that bungs other software on your system. Still, I'd obviously headed it off at the pass as there was no service running. I only noticed when I insisted that Windows Explorer stop hiding things from me. You really do have to stay alert with this software stuff. If only programmers didn't always feel they know better than us mere mortals what we should have, and where (for that matter) on our PCs we should have it.
After six months, my feelings towards Win7 are a lot warmer than they ever were to Vista (a shameful disgrace of a system). And having given my iMac to Junior, I'm now amused to note that Ubuntu's 'Unity' desktop looks pretty much like my former OSX desktop did after I'd tinkered with it. But, to be honest, there wasn't much wrong with my ancient RISC OS desktop over two decades ago. Back then, Windows was still learning how to walk and chew gum at the same time. Now it just leaves bits of chewed gum stuck all over my C: drive, of course.