2013 — 13 June: Thursday
I'm already feeling quite virtuous this morning.1 As I sup my cup and listen to NPR's analysis of the continuing fallout from PRISM I've:
- signed an Avaaz.org petition in support of Edward Snowden,
- ordered and downloaded the new album ("Little March", a collaboration with Adam Levy) from Shelley Segal's "Bandcamp" niche, and
- logged back in to the new Synology NAS to discover that the process I left running overnight of scrubbing2 the new twin-disk volume for parity consistency is currently 91.2% complete
Meanwhile, I also read the Wikipedia material on the ext4 file system. I am, as usual, no wiser but considerably better-informed. It certainly isn't a system that will be running out of potential space any time soon. What would I ever find to fill a volume of 260 bytes?
I'm not proud...
... of my ignorance. For example, I'd never heard of Merry Clayton — but there can be only a few people who have never heard her. She even sang on Altman's "Brewster McCloud" for heaven's sake. (Link.)
Having first taken...
... the precaution of topping up dear Mama's account with the wherewithal (lovely word) to meet her next monthly care-home fee (business before pleasure) I've now embarked gently and tentatively on the great "Let's see just how quickly I can fill up the NAS" adventure. I shall check that I can stream music, photo, and video files from it to the natty little WD HD TV before I get much older.
I had a nasty moment and was more than a little taken aback to see the Synology suggesting I should load the "latest Java for my operating system" on to BlackBeast, though its current3 absence doesn't seem to be hindering me from creating and filling shared folders on the NAS with data visible over my network to my Win8 system.
And, after a fiddly session of network credentials input with the virtual keyboard on its remote control, I can now confirm all formats of my data safely making it across to my media streamer. Excellent. On with the data bit-shovelling. And a celebratory cuppa. It's 11:21 and both cool and rather moist out in the real world.
My post-prandial news...
... includes (another) phone call from the care-home alerting me to (another) tumble by dear Mama (yesterday), this time bruising her leg somewhat. But she's down in the lounge again today and back in the ever-deeper groove of her regular routine, apparently none the worse for the already-forgotten episode. Perhaps they should confiscate her football?
And the snaffling of a copy of "Brewster" on import DVD. It claims to have been remastered, and will (when it arrives) displace the DVD-R copy I dubbed nearly a decade ago from a venerable NTSC LaserDisc before that finally succumbed to 'laser rot'. (Not an ailment the LaserDisc makers were ever very keen to admit existed. It was probably triggered by the glue used to stick the two halves of each LD together proving porous to air which, in turn, helped corrode the aluminium layer carrying all those tiny bits of analogue video and [latterly] digital audio data.)
Just heard...
... a cleverly-mangled version of "The Big Dee Jay" by Paddy Roberts, as re-mixed (I suspect) by DJ Yoda.
Only on BBC 6Music, of course :-)
I note that the Avaaz petition is already comfortably past the quarter of a million mark, too. Good. And I've just moved the Synology so its flashing LEDs can flash, as it were, unseen upon the living room air. I must say, it's a desirable little piece of kit.
I've transferred the subset of files I want online for the time being, including all the laboriously-ripped CD music. Though I have it all backed-up elsewhere, and (of course) on my original CDs, I don't relish the thought of any further humongous MP3 creation sessions.
Isn't that nice...
... of the US Supreme Court to rule, unanimously, that isolated human genes may not be patented? Perhaps they could consider their guvmint's stance on surveillance next, preferably as a matter of some urgency.
For years, members of Congress ignored evidence that domestic intelligence-gathering had grown beyond their control, and, even now, few seem disturbed to learn that every detail about the public's calling and texting habits now reside in a N.S.A. database.
Alas, I suspect my own entry in that database would be sparse — that's if it exists, and is accurate. Though come to think of it, my molehole email server (living, at the time, on a Celeron Linux box under Christa's office desk) spent several months on Verizon's blacklist over six years ago. Does that count?
Sour grapes
I didn't want to use it anyway :-)
I was always being...
... told, as a lad, that I would forget my head if it wasn't screwed on. Given my unbeatability at memory games such as "Pairs", I have to say I rather resented this piece of well-rehearsed family "wit". However (to my chagrin) — having just tidied up the morass of power and data cabling behind the PC desk — when I switched on all the disk drives, and the Synology, inspected the result in the Explorer window, and totted everything up... I don't have a nominal 15TB of data storage, I have a nominal 18TB. I misunderestimated, as Dubya might have said.
D: 3TB (primary data) E: 3TB (primary backup) H: 1TB (eSATA backup) I: 1TB (eSATA data) K: 1TB (USB3 docs and pix) L: 1TB (USB3 music) M: 1TB (USB3 videos) N: 1TB (USB3 spare) O: 3TB (USB3 backup) NAS: 3TB (RAID1 pair)