2012 — 10 March: Saturday

An extremely sluggish start1 mandates a lazy day, today, methinks. So I've already declined the next walk. But there's a cuppa on the way, so it's not all doom and gloom. No pain either, and some delicious Satie on the radio.

Inspiration strikes — eventually

It belatedly occurred to me — in the belated way that things do — that, were I to increase the speed of BlackBeast's top fan temporarily to its maximum setting and sit Christopher's troublesome network drive directly over the vent, I just might be able to eke longer periods of functioning out of the blasted thing. Makes things a bit noisy around here, but that's what the volume control on the audio system is for :-)

As far as I can tell, it's something in the drive's network interface section that is getting too hot for comfort and shutting down its connectivity after about 20 minutes of file copying. This has been making the data retrieval a mighty slow process, but it's all in a good cause.

[Pause] Good theory, but little or no discernible difference in MTBF. If I had to assign a technical term to describe the state of this drive (or, to be more precise, its network interface) I'd say it was "comprehensively shagged". Still, I've so far retrieved 25,200 files (88 GB). This makes up the vast majority of the music files that were "#1 priority". [Further pause] There's also a problem when trying to transfer files above a certain size. Individual MP3s are (generally) not a problem, but raw .wav files are turning out to be a 'no go' area. I suspect video files will also, as it were, break the bank.

Meanwhile...

... the crockpot is stuffed, and listening to tales of payment protection insurance mis-selling (and extreme tardiness of compensation) only convinces me that I was correct never to take any out. Lies and deceit, plus nobody getting the sack, plus banking bonuses. Grrr.

Somewhat later...

... another 20,000 plus files have trickled gently across from the troublesome drive to one of my spares. "Trickled" being about the only word appropriate for a transfer rate of around 5MB/second. Still, at least my cooling blast of air has been doing the trick. The drive is cool to the touch and has been running continuously for the last eight hours or more. Crikey. It's about time to decant (some of) the contents of the crockpot into the tum.

It will be pleasant to call a halt for a while, and resume normal levels of ambient noise hereabouts.

  

Footnote

1  Preceded by what feels like only a few minutes of sleep last night.