crappy computers

Windows claims my broken disk is just fine, having checked it. It's not though, as I know of at least one file it can't open properly, reporting 'bad block' in the event log. Very odd. I'd check it with the manufacturer's disk checking software, except that to run it requires you to boot from a floppy disk drive, which that computer doesn't possess.

I put a new 250GB disk in, which is all very well, but it'll be annoying having to re-install everything when the current setup is only about 6 months old, and having wasted my money on the last disk drive, which will probably prove impossible or impractical to get a refund for. Ah well.

So currently I'm on the old Windows 98 PC; although the XP computer does work for the most part, I'm trying to avoid doing something that might break it further. Win98 is reminding me of how unstable it is on a regular basis. I would boot into Mandriva Linux but that has a tendency to hang solid when I do certain things (such as access the shared network drives from the XP machine), presumably because it's not got proper drivers for the wireless card. I hate computers.

nothing

A boring update solely for my benefit:

Friday: went out to metal night at Rock City, which was a little disappointing, but shouldn't complain too much. A little under-attended, but reasonable fun regardless. Strange how so many people seemed to leave without saying goodbye though. synphony remarked that he thought I'd already left, so maybe that's why.

Saturday: I physically installed my new disk drive, and got around to making a DVD backup of all my stuff. All well and good so far. Went to Tom + Zoe's mini-housewarming party on Saturday. Again, a little underattended, but still reasonable fun. He said he wasn't inviting many people so that's fair enough. We watched about 34645 episodes of Trap Door, the Beavis and Butthead movie, and a bit of some police documentary which demonstrated that British police are about 100 times tamer than their American counterparts.

Sunday: Tried reinstalling Windows XP on the new drive and discovered that I had the wrong key for it. Doh. Of course, by that point in the installation it appears to have reset my BIOS settings to something neutral so it no longer boots into my old XP installation either, hanging at some 'checking DMI settings' part during bootup before launching the hard disk's boot loader. Double doh. It still boots from CD ok though, so I will do that just as soon as I uncover the proper CD key for Windows.

I also purchased a cheap CD player today so that I could listen to music while the computer's broken. It's got a facility to play back music from my old mp3 player, and allegedly can convert cassettes to MP3s - useful for preserving what is left on my cassette collection. Unfortunately though, it seems to be using digital extraction on the cds rather than analogue extraction, which means there's an audible gap between tracks. Grr. Oh well, not fatal I suppose.

Now I am going to start working on my new website again, and perhaps clean the melted plastic off the cooker. Did I ever mention that I hate cooking? Once or twice, perhaps.

spam: lost in translation?

I just discovered that I have junk mail with the subject: "But now I can penetrate hardly and give the pleasure to every woman!" Now, I have no idea what lotion or potion they are promoting but if it makes me 'penetrate hardly' then, you know, I might give it a miss.