Happy World Giraffe Day, Happy Seashell Day and Happy Cuckoo Warning Day too.
Not quite so happy for me today though because when I went to switch on the computer it wouldn’t fire up.
After a couple of hours of tinkering I managed to make it fire up but not even the BIOS would work. The hard drive has been creaking away over the last few days but last night it must have creaked its last croak..
it wasn’t all that unexpected and I had a few spare hard drives lying around so I started it off with a 1TB Solid State drive and spent a very happy morning configuring it and uploading an operating system
When I’d finished that and everything was running properly I had a rummage around and found an old 4TB drive that I’d been using at one time as a back-up drive before I bought the desktop array. This drive had about 900GB free space on it so I added that into the computer.
And so even as we speak, I’m going through the stuff on this drive and sorting everything out.
But it goes to show just how important having a back-up is. There’s a big memory stick that lives permanently in a USB port at the back of the computer. Every night before I go to bed I copy onto it the data files on which I’ve been working during the day
In case of an emergency it takes a while to sort out the directories in which each file might belong but at least they are all there. and at least it all kept me out of mischief while the cleaner was here.
Something that has been quite strange though is that while all of this was going on, I didn’t somehow manage to crash out. That’s quite a rare event these days, especially when I was up and about before the alarm went off too, despite how I was feeling yesterday.
There was even time to transcribe the notes that were on the dictaphone from the night. I’d been off somewhere last night. While I was away someone had taken one of the cars out. There had been a boiler explosion and it was sitting in the middle of the road with bits all blown around about it. Apparently no-one was hurt but the car had been sitting there since 03:00 and it was becoming light. People were having to pick their way around the wreckage in the street. I wanted to know whether my father had been told about this and if so what was he doing. It turned out that he had. One of these days he was going to get round to fixing it but he was busy right now. he was going out taking our exchange student back to college. I said “of course you can’t just leave the car there”. I was planning on phoning up having it moved, having a breakdown truck in etc. In the end I decided that it was really none of my business. If that’s what he wanted to do with it then that’s entirely up to him. By now our exchange student was ready to go to bed but she wasn’t very happy about me being there while she was being dressed so she asked me to leave. I thought to myself “I’ve seen plenty of girls in a state of undress before. One more isn’t going to make any difference but I suppose that I’d better go to find something else to do so I walked out of the room.
Later, I went to see Man play somewhere in Belgium I think. I’d arranged to interview Micky Jones afterwards so I had to catch the bus so far, walk the rest of the way. While I was walking I bumped into Deke Leonard. We were both soaked to the skin and wet. We arrived where Micky Jones was. I had to wait. He kept me waiting for quite some time while he finished off a few things. By this time I was dying to go to the bathroom but I thought “if I go to the bathroom now and he comes down I’ll miss him”. Eventually he came down and when he came close he looked nothing like he did on stage. We began to chat. He said that he was one of several who came from somewhere specific in Wales and went on to tell me about all the problems they’d had, how Deke Leonard hadn’t stored the stuff where it was supposed to be. It was in some other place which wasn’t very convenient and he didn’t think was secure. He has to go round every couple of hours to check on the instruments etc to make sure that they are still there and not moved
Tea tonight was another on of these leftover whatsits with the leftovers, some kidney beans and tomato sauce with pasta and veg, followed by the last of the cinnamon roll and ice cream. A good meal it was too.
So having been busy, I’m off to ned now, hoping that the computer will start tomorrow without having to wind it up. But at least, in principle, a Solid State Drive is more reliable than an old type of drive and I’d been planning to change things for quite a while.
At least, it’s done now.
