Bastards.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:11 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Bleh.

For the past couple of weeks I've been tied up with some pretty blerky stuff at work. I'm supposed to be developing a whole new wonderful web thingy, and as soon as I got some momentum going I got dragged away to toil in the salt mines.

Necessary, but not fun at all.

Anyway, what with the long hours underground and all, I've been so exhausted during my daily commute that I haven't had the mental capacity to hack code on my notebook, which is what I usually do. Two hours a day without interruptions isn't something to waste, but neither my eyes nor my brain were inclined to focus.

So I've been listening to podcasts.

Started out with The Diner, which is pretty darn good for a one-man show. The triumph of technology and talent. Listened to a few episodes of the Glenn and Helen Show. They have some interesting guests (Vernor Vinge, for example), but also some guests I'm not interested in at all (John McCain). And, uh, how to put this... Helen's voice makes my sensitive Australian ears bleed.

Moved on to Hoist the Black Flag, which I think is on hiatus or something. That's a shame, because I think it's pretty good. Ace tends to ramble a bit, but in an entertaining way, and both Karol and Jeff make good co-hosts. Rusty also made an appearance, which was cool. Hi guys! (Waves.)

Ran out of those, and wandering about a bit I discovered that Hugh Hewitt is also available as a podcast. (Also Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, The Northern Alliance, and others I hadn't heard of.) Now, these are conservatives, in a way Glenn Reynolds, Ace, Jeff and I aren't. I'm a centre-right/libertarian-sympathetic/secular-humanist/futurist/otaku/geek/neophile. If there were a standardised left-right political scale (made out of platinum-iridium alloy and kept in a vacuum in a laboratory in Paris), I'd be off somewhere in the 11th dimension.

Hugh Hewitt's not so bad. I haven't heard anything really unexpected, and he has a good sense of humour. It's great to hear him tearing into the latest piece of idiocy from the NY or LA Times. Dennis Prager, on the other hand, I'll be listening and nodding, yep, yep, yep, where the hell did that come from? Except I know, really, it's just that in my world this puzzle piece and that one don't actually fit together, at least not without a bit of work with some sharp scissors and a pot of glue.

But - what was my point? Oh yes. What I really noticed is that the conservative talk radio guys sound an awful lot like bloggers. You're probably saying Duh, but I never really listened to them before.

Oh, and the other thing: Listening to conservative talk radio? I'm turning into my father.

Not complaining. Just an observation.

Of course, I get to skip over the ads and the more annoying callers. Which is most of them, come to think of it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:38 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Well, I already have an iPod, but a new iPod. A 60GB video iPod.

And the funny thing is, it's completely legitimate and cheaper than the way we were doing the task previously.

iTunes remains the spawn of Satan, but I like iPods.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:33 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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If you find yourself in this situation, get Knoppix. It works.*

The disk is somewhat dead. Not truly and sincerely dead, but not well at all. But I'm backing up my email right now, and if I can get that, most of the other stuff is already backed up.

* Mostly. It hasn't recognised the other four internal drives, three of which form a single 600GB filesystem. But they are intact anyway, judging from the Windows XP recovery function. Just means I have to be verrrry careful when I rebuild the thing.

Update: Okay, all the important email is backed up. If I lose some of my mailing list archives, not a big deal. The personal stuff is all copied. Yay!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:52 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I wanted to transfer some podcasts onto my iPod so that I don't have to carry my notebook around to listen to them. Straightforward enough. iTunes wanted to be updated, and I haven't allowed it to do so for a few months, so I said okay.

Then it wanted to reboot, of course. Whatever.

After rebooting, things were not good. The machine was grindingly slow, Firefox wouldn't run at all, generally craperiffic. Okay, let's do a hard reset and see what...

So \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM is corrupted, huh? Well it was JUST FINE A MINUTE AGO!!

Now it wants my original Windows CD. That's something I have no shortage of, except that I need the one with built-in SP1 goodness, because this machine has a 200GB boot disk and Microsoft... Well, Microsoft are Microsoft.

Is it in my carefully-assembled CD folder? It is not.

Is it in the backup CD folder? It is not.

Is it... Well, there's not that many places it can be. I supposed I could look upstairs where the remaining boxes are, though the chance of my finding anything smaller than a water buffalo are mid-way between slim and oh, hello. (Update: Oops, no, that one doesn't have SP1 either.)

Well, let's see what it makes of it. Can't DIR the Windows directory, huh? Let's try a CHKDSK. Blah blah... One or more unrecoverable problems? You don't say. (Update: Which might be just because it's pre-SP1 and doesn't understand the disk geometry. Dunno. Probably not, since it could read the other drives okay, and they're larger.)

Yes, I'm grabbing a copy of Knoppix right now. And it's coming down at 1.8MB/sec, so it won't even take that long.

Update: Got Knoppix - just the CD version. Burned it to a DVD because I don't have any CD-R's, but it doesn't seem to think it's bootable.

Bleh.

I'll fix it tomorrow.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:16 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Israel at 20,770 km² and 6,352,117 people is somewhat larger.

Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and Jordan combined are about the same size as the weapons testing range at Woomera in South Australia.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:28 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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More here.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:24 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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As Ace notes, it looks like it was just a tragic mishap.

Maybe there was something else going on - but the evidence doesn't support that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:14 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:28 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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