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I’m sure that most of us refrain from eating while in the bathroom. However, if you go to this restaurant, you might find it a bit, um, uncomfortable.
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I am really sad; the pioneers of the lesbian and gay justice movement in the United States from the 1940’s and 1950’s are passing away quickly. Del Martin was one of the greatest of them–with her wife Phyllis Lyon she founded the Daughters of Bilitis organisation in the 1950’s and thus spearheaded the more radical organisations of the 1960’s and 1970’s. This is her New York Times obituary, and while I’m sad that she has left us, and send my condolences to Ms. Lyon, I am happy that she lived to be legally married to Phyllis and in that she was yet again a pioneer.
May she rest in peace and rise in glory.
(reposted from gaygeeks)
You may remember that I posted a few days ago about a problem that I thought was related to Vista having to do with my hard disks failing in RAID 0.
Well, this morning I got a message from the Intel Matrix Storage Manager that a new download was available that might fix my problem. It was one of those “Windows thinks it can solve your problem” messages.
Well, I downloaded the new version of the Storage Manager, installed it, rebooted (and endured an almost endless CHKDSK full of funny errors), and logged back in. The Storage Manager icon was still there, demanding attention. However, when I opened it and right clicked on the “failing” disk, it said that I could “Mark it as normal”, which I did. On rebooting (again), no problems came up.
So the difficulty that I thought was Vista corrupting my disk seems to have been related to the Intel software that runs my RAID controller.
While I’m not out of the woods yet (lots of other things are turning up), I’m grateful for all the suggestions (and, yes, I got my Stephen Gibson SpinRite money back today) and also grateful that the disk problem was repairable and now is also explainable.
Well, sorry I haven’t been keeping up with life except with twitter compendia, which have turned off at least two of you. Sorry about that. I shall make up for that.
First, it looks like my assignment in Hinckley (via Nuneaton) is over. The trains are not running correctly for the next two weeks, so I shall complete my deliverables this week. It’s been a real roller-coaster. My life felt like Groundhog Day (the movie).
Up at 6 am (as usual), out of the house at 7:15, to Euston Station, get on train for 8:17 departure, work on train with my data card until I get to Nuneaton, Warwickshire, at 9:21. Sandeep’s Taxi to Hinckley, where I worked until 4 pm. Reverse everything: taxi to Nuneaton, train at 4:35 pm to arrive at Euston around 5:47pm. Then crash most days, unless I went to the gym with M or we went out to dinner.
It does take a lot out of you.
The work, on the other hand, was interesting. I can’t talk about it, but I learned a lot about the UK gas network.
Sandeep was pretty talkative, which was a bit off-putting, but I managed to get some solitude in the back of the cab. Hinkley itself is a real deadspot. There is little or no traffic through the centre, the only decent restaurant is a Subway (although there is a KFC and various other delightful places to dine), and the local constabulary advertises itself as the Last Chance Inn where miscreants are housed for the night.
We had a lovely day on Saturday. It proved to be the only really decent day on the Bank Holiday weekend. So, it was a day for a picnic. We gathered up our friends Mark, M,
We had trouble with children running around screaming, being breastfed, and the like, but tried to ignore the noise. Here are a few pictures from the event:
And Mark drew our attention to a cloud that was sailing past (one among many). He thought it was “penis-shaped”. I think it has more to do with his mind…
A good time was had by all, I think. We arrived home and slept the sleep of the just.
Sunday after church we took a walk across Southwark Bridge and along the Embankment to Villiers Street, where we had a Starbucks moment.
Monday we did bugger-all. Just relaxed at home. This is a very good thing when you’ve been commuting 110 miles morning and evening for a month.
The rest of this week I’ve been working at home, finishing up bits and bobs for work.
Tuesday night we went out to dinner with
I am really through with restaurants that, for our own protection, cook beef to the point where it is unappetising. The danger from BSE has pretty much ended and the need (if there ever was one) to cook burgers until they are dead, dead, DEAD! is over.
After that we walked off our food in a circle, walking to Charing Cross Road, Oxford Street, and Dean Street, ending up back on Old Compton Street and having coffee in Caff
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Well, I’m going to be begging for help, so all you computer alpha-experts out there, please take note. I’ve also posted this to the gaygeeks community.
As y’all will know if you’ve kept up with your friends’ lists, last weekend I installed Windows Vista Ultimate on my Dell desktop computer as an “upgrade” from XP. It has a RAID 0 disk array with something like 400GB of storage space on two drives, 3GB of RAM, dual-core CPU, etc. and so on and so forth. If there is other information that you might find useful in assisting please don’t hesitate to ask. The current disk is a Samsung SP2504C, 232.8 GB
I have had nothing but trouble since I installed Vista. First, Microsoft put forward a flurry of Windoze Updates, which drove me mad for about 3 or 4 days before they stopped. Second, various programs do not function correctly in Vista. MailWasher throws up two or four error messages before it starts working; Eudora is not particularly well-suited to Vista and is not recognised as the email program; something called HP CUE was not working, and told me so, very verbosely. But all of these were software problems and, I presumed, after a few weeks’ running I’d find solutions to them all.
Yesterday I discovered that there are errors in one of the RAID hard disks. I very quickly took a backup using Norton Ghost to duplicate my C: drive on another drive. That seemed to work OK. However, last night, to my horror, I discovered that my Eudora inbox was empty. The file was zero-length. I copied the inbox over from my backup (and lost a few emails but not many; I can restore them from MailWasher if there are any that I really need). I then copied all of Eudora onto my 16GB memory stick, and will do so again today so that I have a current backup. I may transfer working to one of my laptops so that I will be able to preserve this machine.
The question is: How do I proceed?
1. I will need two hard disks to recreate the RAID array, I presume. Does anyone have recommendations for a good, long-lasting, durable hard disk that would work well in a system that is on 24/7? I won’t say that money is no object, but if I buy an expensive set of disks I want them to be worth the money.
2. I don’t have the option of moving to a Mac or a Linux system, really. Is there anything about Vista that’s poisonous to the kind of system I’m on at the moment and, if so, what can I do about it?
3. Is there any good way of repairing the hard disk or even diagnosing it for repair? I have used CHKDSK and that wasn’t too helpful. I’m prepared for a “no” on this one but thought I’d ask.
4. Does anyone have any other advice they think pertinent to my plight? I guess recommending a good backup system that’s robust and can work around disk errors would be good–in my opinion Ghost is crapware (ever since Symantec took Peter Norton over the Norton line of products seems to have suffered) but Windows Backup in Vista is even worse. None of these things seem to be disk-fault-tolerant and that is important when you’re doing an emergency backup.
Thanks for any assistance anyone can give.
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So, chrishansenhome, your LiveJournal reveals…
You are… 0% unique and 0% herdlike. When it comes to friends you are popular. In terms of the way you relate to people, you are keen to please. Your writing style (based on a recent public entry) is conventional.
(The average level of weirdness is: 27.
You are weirder than 8% of other LJers.)
August is traditionally the silly season for news. The editors are away, the politicians are (usually) away, titans of business are away, nothing much goes on. But the newspapers (and other news outlets) need something to report. So the editors issue commands to the hordes of reporters at their beck and call: “Find some news and report it!”
Mondegreens are a subject that’s as old as the hills. But Auntie Beeb seems to think they were just invented yesterday.
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No, it has nothing to do with the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s Puerto Rican, actually, and concerns a most curious wake. Thanks to the Register for the English story, which I saw yesterday in Spanish, but even with the help of Babelfish I had difficulty translating it well enough to share with you all.
Do visit the site referenced at the end of the story, by the way. My Singaporean Chinese friends especially will find this a very pertinent story, given that this is the month of the Hungry Ghost.
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1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you
Well, it’s been a rather uninteresting week. I’ve been commuting up to Nuneaton/Hinckley all week, and this leaves me unable to blog much, although my Twitter entries, filed each day in LifeJournal courtesy of LoudTwitter, do give some picture of what I’ve been up to.
I had a tour of the control room for the national high-pressure gas distribution network on Thursday in connection with the project I’m working on at the moment. It was most interesting, and I have an appreciation, yet again, of what the work I’m doing actually means in the real world. I won’t describe the room, except to say it was quite small, with stations for each section of the country. The system itself is necessary to keep our ovens cooking and our boilers boiling. The people in that room are responsible for ensuring that enough gas is pumped into the gas accumulators at times of low usage to supply the country’s gas needs at times of high usage. Thousands of sensors all over the country send their reading every few minutes to the control room, where they are shown on these screens. If pressure falls too low, or gets too high, the operator is responsible for operating the valves and controls to fix the problem. Most remarkable.
Other than that, we had a fairly quiet week. I had a coffee with our friend M, on Thursday, and offered him my shoulder and a listening ear. Last night we had Chinese food with our friend Stuart, who will be celebrating his 45th birthday next week, and some of his friends. Lovely meal at a restaurant we’d never tried before. I had dumplings, which were really good, and Szechuan beef, which was also really good and not excessively filling.
I am getting to grips with Vista. Somehow (I think that an update from NVidia came through) the resolution problems with my monitor seem to have gone away. I had to repair iTunes and QuickTime in order for them to work with Vista, and I expect that other little surprises will trickle in, kind of like when you’re burgled and, for weeks and months thereafter, you discover that little things have disappeared from your home. I still can’t get Vista to recognise Eudora sufficiently to open a new email when I click on a “mailto” link on a webpage. Still working on that and may have another step towards a solution. MailWasher Pro (my spam killer) throws up error messages when it starts, and then works. The makers of MailWasher promise that it will be updated “soon”. I hope so; I depend on it to keep the 419ers and the pill-pushers and the porn-masters from overwhelming my mailbox. Windows is still pushing lots of updates my way; I wish they’d finish and be done with it.
I am still having troubles with backups. Windows Backup says that a file or folder is corrupted and won’t finish off a backup. Ghost is so hopeless that I have to uninstall it, I think. I know that
Off soon to get ready for the day: shower, shave, and then go off to the Pride Run in Victoria Park in East London, where HWMBO is going to run and M and I are going to cheer him on. Then lunch, and back home for a restful afternoon and evening, I hope.
BTW, I am an Olympic widow most nights; I, on the other hand, have watched about 1 minute of the Games, I think.
When I was a lad, the town hall in Marblehead (called Abbot Hall after the gentleman who donated the land for it) had a glass case in the corridor that contained a collection of wrapped sugar cubes from restaurants all over the world. It’s now been removed (it was attracting ants, apparently), sadly. However, perhaps this museum might send a travelling exhibit to fill the empty case.
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I’m getting used to Vista, and have now come across another difficult problem. I use Eudora for email, but when (in Vista) I click on a “mailto” command, it tries to configure Outlook.
I am going to try to uninstall Outlook, but after that I am hoping that Vista will relent and let me “mailto” through Eudora.
Anyone else solved this problem? Am I barking up the right tree?
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Gosh, it’s gone by so quickly, mostly through my own silliness.
Yesterday was going to be a crappy day, with rain and wind. But, our friend M wanted to go to the Thai Food Festival at Greenwich Park, so we duly got on a 188 bus. Getting there was OK, but once we got there the skies opened. There was a lot of good food there, although the coconut milk wasn’t very good (M said that the coconut wasn’t fresh): I loved the Thai Green Curry and the mango with sticky rice. But the wind and the rain were so pervasive that the few people who were there along with us simply crowded under trees and ate disconsolately. It must have been a terrible disappointment to the organisers. I was disappointed too, as I like Thai food and we weren’t going to get much.
We got on a 188 bus to go back to the Elephant, but what a mistake THAT was…the roadworks were all on that side of the street and it took us more than an hour to get back home, where it would normally take 20-25 minutes. I got off at home, and HWMBO continued on with M to central London, where he did a bit of shopping. We should have taken the Docklands Light Railway instead, or the 188 going the other way and changed at North Greenwich.
On the other hand, I decided that, for various reasons, I should install Vista on my computer, now that I’ve had it for more than a year and SP1 is out and running. I first discovered that the 64-bit version won’t upgrade; you have to install it on a new machine and lose all your settings. I declined and installed the 32-bit version.
It took quite a while, and I didn’t leave the computer until around midnight (from 7 pm).
The computer work continued today, after church. Some of the difficulties include:
— The desktop icons are too large, and I couldn’t get the screen to accept all of them at one time. I’ve had to put some folders on the desktop and use them to contain icons of similar use, such as “Website” and “System utilities”. I now can see them all on the desktop.
— Everything was so slooooow. I turned off the Aero and went back to Windows Classic, and that seemed to help no end.
— I kept getting messages from the MDM, a debugger. They have now stopped. I don’t know whether that’s because I’ve fixed it, or because the machine is tired of showing them to me and will start again when it gets a second wind. I haven’t tried a Google search yet. Too spaced out.
— My Creative Sound Blaster Audigy didn’t work (known driver problem). I had to download the drivers and spend about 3/4 hour jollying them along until they worked. Now they’re fine.
— My HP printers didn’t work at all. I had to reinstall the HP Photosmart 3210 software before that worked; I had some difficulty with the Bluetooth-connected HP Laserjet 4P as HP doesn’t keep drivers for it around any longer, and the item that appears in the Device Manager is the Bluetooth adapter, not the printer. I managed to fool it into thinking that the 4P was directly connected and got that working.
The next step is to repartition the disk and get all my data onto one partition, and all the programs into another. Then I should go through, uninstall the programs I don’t want, and then take a backup of each partition. Oh, and I need to get rid of Ghost, it really sux.
I have heard that the Olympics are going on now, but haven’t had a chance to see any cute swimmers or gymnasts.
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I now have dates for our holidays this year:
I shall be in Massachusetts from 11-19th of September, and HWMBO and I will be in Singapore from 17 October until 3 November. arriving back in London 4 November.
I would like to spend a few days in New York or maybe in Washington DC, but don’t know whether I can do that. I would actually like to travel down there 1st class on Amtrak and back.
In Singapore we will probably take one side trip somewhere (I know not where).
Next year: Australia!!!
As those of you who read my LoudTwitter LJ posts will know, I’ve been commuting to Nuneaton/Hinckley for the past three weeks for my job. I’m doing some release management and quality assessment work for a large utility. Interesting stuff, but it does leave me pretty exhausted at the end of the day. I am getting behind in my email reading, my LiveJournal reading, and in my life in general.
I have, however, discovered the value of Twitter in keeping a record of what’s happening in slices of 140 characters or less. This is quite useful, and I am becoming more enamoured of it the longer I remain in Nuneaton.
The highlight (or lowlight) of this week was yesterday, when my taxi driver failed to show up at the site to take me to Nuneaton Station in time for the 4:35 train to London. I called Sandeep (we are on a first-name basis now) and he told me that he had asked a friend of his to pick me up in his place because he needed to take his family somewhere. The friend had gone to another site in Hinckley, TNT (the delivery people), and picked up someone else for the train station. Sandeep had sent someone else to TNT, and he returned empty-taxied because the other driver had picked up the fare that he was meant to pick up.
Sandeep was in his family car with his family, and turned around and came to Hinckley and picked me up, with wife and son in the back seat, and took me to Nuneaton, not in time for the 4:35 train but what could one do? I thanked him profusely and didn’t become depressed or annoyed about it, as there was nothing that could be done. This is good for me, as I tend to become nervous and grumpy when transport doesn’t work out well. I think it’s the beta-blocker, which makes me more mellow, on the whole.
So I went into the coffee shop at Nuneaton, bought a few train-related magazines and a mug of coffee, and whiled away some pleasant time reading about American trains. Got the 5:35 train, which stopped at Rugby and Milton Keynes, and got home around 7:30 pm.
I hope that things will be much more pleasant next week.
Happy birthday to you all!
And happy National Day to all my Singaporean LJ friends!
Many happy returns of the day!
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BlackBerry help sucks. I am trying to find out what the little indicator in the second row from the top on my BlackBerry 8310 means. I don’t even know what these indicators are called so I can’t do a search, and the BlackBerry manuals I’ve seen online don’t have pictures (too unsophisticated, I suppose…). It is under the “GPRS” indicator, and is a rectangle with two dots inside it.
I am going nuts!
If anyone can put me out of my misery, please help!
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I think it’s because I’m Twittering more.
I will ponder this.
Meanwhile, read the Daily Tweets and mentally expand them into a whole blog post.
Or not.
Suit yourselves.
I will try to blog more.
I apologise for not blogging much lately. I suppose I should be blogging on the train going to Nuneaton, which is where my current assignment is. Once we leave Euston Station and I have read my email, I usually slip into a reverie and don’t bother to do much until I get to the office, where I am fully employed doing some process improvement and release procedures. When I get home, I’m usually exhausted so I just read everyone else’s blogs and fall asleep, to dream of really weird things such as people who walk around with pantographs on their heads drawing power from overhead lines just like trains do.
The Pendolino trains that ply the rails between London and Nuneaton (ending up in Liverpool) are quite good, actually. They get up to pretty good speed, and lean into curves mechanically, allowing for faster speeds overall. The cost for a day return ticket is
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