This accidentally fell out of her pocket when I bumped into her. Took me four goes.

Saturday, September 18

Rant

A Pox, I Say!

A pox on all makers of disk drives and designers of file systems!

A pox!

Yes, while I was backing up everything on my Windows box so that I could attempt to convince it that the boot disk was not the G drive and that the system disk was not that spare disk I installed one day with a certain amount of comfort that I would not lose every last one of my files, my trusty* external disk decided that it didn't want to play any more. Well, it decided it was going to make some unhappy noises and refuse to write anything more and Windows decided that that was a good enough excuse to lock up completely.

So I've now pressed my emergency back-up Linux box into play. It's built up out of all the spare parts I have lying around from previous systems, and it has so far stubbornly refused to die. Of course, it's old and clunky and slow, but it actually works.

So now I can copy all my files onto that, reformat everything attached to my Windows box, reinstall Windows for the third time in a week, and then copy everything back again. Joy.

Then I'm going to buy me a UPS.

* It hasn't suffered massive file corruption for, like, months.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:30 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 225 words, total size 1 kb.

Tuesday, September 07

Rant

Lapham & Wolcott

Lapham has now entered our language as a term for reporting an event in the past tense before it has actually occurred. We have a similar opportunity presented to us by one James Wolcott, who writes:
I root for hurricanes. When, courtesy of the Weather Channel, I see one forming in the ocean off the coast of Africa, I find myself longing for it to become big and strong--Mother Nature's fist of fury, Gaia's stern rebuke. Considering the havoc mankind has wreaked upon nature with deforesting, stripmining, and the destruction of animal habitat, it only seems fair that nature get some of its own back and teach us that there are forces greater than our own.

....

Hurricane Frances also has a heraldic quality. Camille Paglia observed on Salon in February, 2003 that the explosion of the Columbia shuttle on the eve of the war on Iraq was a "stunning omen," one that would make a Roman general think twice. A catastrophe strewing death, fire, and human remains across Bush's home state of Texas was inauspicious to our undertaking; and so it has proven to be. Frances is the second hurricane to afflict Florida, home of brother Jeb, in rapid succession.

The gods are not pleased.

Okay, so Wolcott is clearly nuts, a good 8.5 on the SDL* scale. But we need to define this new term better than that. A verb, perhaps: wolcott v. To wish for the mass destruction of one's fellow humans, in the smug assurance that this could never happen to you.

More at Tim Blair and Dave Barry.

* Standardised Delusional Lefty

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:08 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 271 words, total size 2 kb.

<< Page 1 of 1 >>
42kb generated in CPU 0.031, elapsed 0.6112 seconds.
52 queries taking 0.5983 seconds, 213 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.
Using https / https://ai.mee.nu / 211