2013 — 8 February: Friday
One day1 I shall 'beat' my son and use email in the morning earlier than he does. I'm starting to suspect he simply never signs out of the service we share. I've just been giving my feedback rating to a German Amazon marketplace seller. Despite having had a beautiful live-in tutor for a third of a century my command of that fine language isn't up to the job of asking why a European Blu-ray lacks several of the "extras" available on the North American edition so I kept things simple.
Much as that splendid chap Nigel Farage (my local MEP) wants to do, it seems, as he kindly (and opportunistically, in light of Mr Huhne's forced resignation) sends me a personal snail mail in which he says he seeks to "alert" me "to what I see as a key threat to Eastleigh in 2013" — namely, being descended upon2 by 29,000,000 Romanians and Bulgarians after 1st January 2014. Just imagine the fun at Dover...
I'd better make a start on clearing out the back bedroom. Sorry, Junior! My country's right-wing lunatic fringe wants me to become a slum landlord, it seems. Or did I mis-read his "threat"? :-)
We're not the only country with lunatic fringes. Take the lovely guy angling to become the next director of the CIA:
Nor was Brennan reassuring on full disclosure, responding with classic doublespeak: "We need to optimize transparency and at the same time optimize secrecy."
Brennan also spewed out misinformation about the CIA's history of torture and paramilitary operations, saying that after 9/11, the agency got involved in activities that were "an aberration from its traditional role."
Actually, those activities were not an aberration at all but fully in keeping with what the CIA did in Vietnam and Laos in the 1960s and early 1970s, and what it did in El Salvador and Guatemala in the late 1970s and 1980s...
I've slowly realised...
... there's a direct ¬inverse — and, probably, causal — correlation between my incipient "wheeziness"3 here in Technology Towers and the time elapsed since the last major corraling of what Trudeau's divine "Boopsy" calls the 'dust bunnies'. Hence my morning flurry of domestic Dysoning before rewarding myself with breakfast. The low angle of the incoming sunlight highlighted the problem areas. I now expect and await the formal protest lodged by displaced members of the clearly-local chapter of the Union of Arachnid Freeloaders.
Speeding HDDs
I'd specified next Monday for delivery of last night's just pre-midnight order of two new disc drives, so this morning's ParcelForce tracking status is quite heartening...
... still, if they arrive today that will simply allow me to make an earlier start on the equally-overdue equivalent — sweeping up misplaced data bits — of my recent Dysoning.
The drives turned up — while I was picking out the bits of celery from my salad lunch — a mere 14 hours after I'd placed my order. They're now sitting, still in their anti-static bags, on my desk while I give them a few hours to get up to the ambient temperature hereabouts. I must say, two lumps of 3000 GB strikes me as awesome. But perhaps that's because I can still remember paying £25 per megabyte of external storage for my Amstrad CP/M system in 1986. Today's £25 buys 750 GB. I'm ignoring monetary inflation.
And this is my next light reading. "Beyond 2TB" indeed.
"To Infinity, and beyond"...
Well, the way I read it, as I have a modern system, run 64-bit Win8 Pro, and don't intend to boot the system off either of the new drives (but just intend to use them as data discs) not only "should" I already be good to go, but the full 2.7 TB or so of usable storage space on each drive "should" be immediately visible to my system. If not, it will then be time to download and tinker with Seagate's extended partition and virtual disc driver tool. As they admit in their own documentation, back in the early 1980s nobody thought for a moment that a stonking great 2.1 TB LBA limit would ever be exceeded on a single storage device in a home computer...
For now, however, it's jolly nearly time to don some fresh glad-rags and head on over to the about-to-re-open (I hope) for 'business' Roger & Eileen Tea Shoppe.
Considerabubble later
I was correct: Win8 Pro had no qualms about letting me initialise and format the full 2.7TB usable space, so that was a complete non-issue. The evening meal is a distant memory, one of the two new drives is already housed in BlackBeast, and has nearly finished sucking up all my MP3 files. I shall then remove the 1TB music drive, refit the 1TB non-music drive, and copy over all the data from that, too. Then I shall fit, initialise, and format the second new drive and immediately make a backup copy of the first one.
After that, if I need to, I can use each of the old 1TB drives in my SATA to USB cradle, at my leisure, to Dyson up any bits I may have missed. It will be nice to have more space and two brand-new drives... (all drives fail eventually, of course).
All data fitted neatly on to the first of the two new drives. I shall defer fitting the second one until I'm a bit fresher tomorrow morning; it's getting rather late — just a few minutes until midnight, in fact.