2016 — 6 May: Friday

I had an interesting half-hour chat with the Fruit of my Loins quite late last night.¹ I gather Big Bro has "reached out" to him on the topic of my virtual (Case #4) NZ travel plans. Families can be such Good Fun. Not that Linux is any more predictable in its behaviour.

My new book...

... on Autism is proving fascinating. I dived in at just before the mid-way point so as to concentrate on the later findings — I'm very much less interested in the earlier, faltering, steps and mis-steps along the way. One of the things I have concluded is that you cannot change what happened² in the past, though you can of course still learn things from analysing it.

The sun is shining, though it's a bit cooler. My second cuppa is now long overdue. Before I commence Skylark's surgery I have one last email enquiry out.

I also finally began...

... watching "House of Cards" season #3 yesterday. But it got off to such a decidedly darker start I may, in fact, now put it back on "hold" while I catch up with some lighter fare for a while. Just as with Sorkin's "West Wing" there's a fair bit of cognitive dissonance between its portrait of Washington and the 'real' world. (Or, at least, I hope there is!)

I have to smile: Petroc has just played the Tom Lehrer song "Oedipus Rex" to celebrate Freud's birthday!

Having enjoyed...

... my first Kathryn Williams CD yesterday, I'm now playing "Hypoxia".

Perhaps it's time to revisit Patti Smith? This was a strange piece, but I've somehow accumulated nine of her albums over the years.

I've turned...

... one end of the living room into a not particularly sterile operating theatre. Now, where's that scalpel? Nurse! [Pause]

The first chirp...

... from Skylark had better be a cheerful one. It has no SSDs, no graphics card, no sound card. Its CMOS RAM is blank. There's now just a PS/2 keyboard, a USB mouse, a network connection, and an HDMI Asus screen. Time for some electricity; Igor, where's that lightning you promised me?

Bingo! The BIOS splash screen. An improvement over the other night's blank screen.
Hit F1 to enter Setup to recover the BIOS
Reset Factory Default state, save and exit. Then power off again.

Now let's see what happens when I refit the NV SSD, and reboot from a "known good" Linux distro USB stick. I shall try putting Mint 17.3 MATE back on to that SSD. If (and only if) that works will be time enough to think about my next step, which is taking another crack³ at Ubuntu 16.04 MATE...

Aren't PCs fun?

Less fun, but...

... very uplifting nonetheless, was this suggested link from Junior last night. Follow it in the right frame of mind and it may help. "A Protocol for Dying"? Excellent idea. I liked this definition, too, from his Devil's Wiki:

Consciousness (n.) That part of the mind that thinks it is in 
charge, and convinces other minds that there is someone home, 
and the lights are on, while the rest of the mind gets on with 
the real work of doing everything.

How's the patient?

Resting quietly. Mint on the NV SSD fell over: "unable to install Grub in /dev/nvme-whatever". This, it assured me, "is a fatal error". Déjà vu all over again. I dismissed the pop-up. Along came the next: "Bootloader install failed (as superuser). How would you like to proceed?" The default action was to pick another device from the pull-down. (Pity there wasn't one.) Choice #2 was "Continue without a bootloader" which didn't seem useful. Choice #3? "Cancel the installation". Did that.

Up popped a hint that this might leave me unable to boot the PC. "Tell me," I thought, "something I don't already know!" So I put Mint on the SATA SSD. It reported another Mint system on the NV SSD, so clearly all was not well. Time to summon the cavalry. "Len, have you got a moment?"

I now have two...

... working systems⁴ on Skylark. Ubuntu 16.04 MATE runs on the "super fast" 512GB NV SSD, and Mint 17.3 on the smaller 250GB SATA SSD. Don't ask me where the Grub menu is, and don't talk about my two separate Bootloaders. Next job? Re-connect Skylark to the 34" Dell. What could possibly go wrong? Just askin'.

Guess what this is...

Yes, yes, clearly it's a piece of CD cover artwork... and it probably means it's something Mr Postie pushed through my letterbox earlier... but what else is it?

Well, it's proof that I've got the Gimp, the Epson scanner, and that handy Kensington USB switcher all working perfectly on Ubuntu. I note the level of the Xsane plugin is slightly newer than on Mint. As is the level of the VLC media player. Just sayin'. Skylark is a very spritely PC, too.

Footnotes

¹  Partly to tell me that he and his g/f will be flying off to Turkey on a short holiday at about the time I'm typing this entry. Partly to tell me that, yes, he would rather like a new (Skylake) MacBook Pro if my "offer" still stands. The Bank of (Mum and) Dad, heh? :-)
²  Case in point: the forgotten debate described here, perhaps?
³  While I think it unlikely that the NV PCI-connected SSD is faulty, it's not impossible. Len has a cunning plan at this stage to "blat" the first 512 bytes on both my SSDs but that's a bit further down the failure road. It's also possible that the Ubuntu distro on the USB stick is faulty, which is why I'm starting once again from the Mint distro. I know it's good. I don't know the Ubuntu is good.
⁴  Since all I wanted was a spare system surely two systems must be better? I will use one as a Linux sandpit. I like to kid myself it keeps the grey cells ticking over.