Things to Make and Do

On a good note, another win for the mighty Arsenal. From the bits I saw, between Sky shutting the coverage down, it looked pretty one-sided and no matter how unlucky the commentators - who sounded unbelievably Celtic-centric - would have you believe, I don't think the hoops were really at the races. Can't really see them scoring four at The Emirates so it's fairly well job done. A moment of sympathy for Caldwell who scored what is likely to turn out to be a *£20M OG.

(* Estimated difference in revenue between Champions League qualification and Europa League)

After a cutting remark from Mrs NoozeHound with regard the speed,or lack of it, from the PC when opening an Excel file, it gnawed away sufficiently for me to acknowledge that I should probably give it a tune-up, or a defrag at least. Now this presents something of a problem because using smartdefrag or XP native defrag, I still fail to get decent results because of the lack of space on the disk. Long story, but while SATA prices have been tumbling by the day to about a fiver per terrabyte, my 17Gb SCSI drive and a secondary or larger replacement seem to have gotten more expensive. Consequently, while I have a server with 500GB I am still squeezed-up on the workstation.

Solution. Move all of the documents and settings off onto the server, perform a defrag then move them back. I already had just over 10% free, so moving off another two and a half gig should see the defraggers do their thing and return some order. So I put FastCopy to work moving the data from local Documents & Settings to the server.  Ran the defrag, then  ran a Windows defrag for good measure.  Despite it's name, moving 2.5GB over 100Mbs was anything but fast. Likewise moving it all back afterwards.

While I was waiting I thought I would put the time to good use. I have an IBM laptop that has taken to going video-wonky. It seemed like there was some kind of loose connection (illogical as that should be) because pressure applied to the case between the touch-pad and the hdd location caused the display to flicker and either work or disappear altogether.

As I said, FastCopy wasn't being especially fast, less so by being delayed while my software firewall paused it (silently) waiting for me to confirm the unauthorised start-up changes. So I had the laptop apart, all the screws and screw covers to look for this illogical loose connection. Keyboard and touch-pad lifted and there it was, clear as day, no loose connection. So I put it all back together again. Mrs NoozeHound had also complained that the laptop was hardly setting speed records either. 769MB running XP should be enough, but it isn't lightening. After tapping it a little I got video again and decided to swap out the HDD for another I had and install Ubuntu on it.

Jaunty Jackalope installed and I'm doing the post-installation stuff, Flash, repositories, the usual list.

Perhaps doing these things side by side may not have been the wisest course of action.

The workstation had lost all the program entries (which by now had finished copying without error). I looked, and yes, all of the files had copied back.  Oh, I'll reboot I thought. That was probably the bigger mistake. I rebooted, still nothing and all the accounts have the chessboard icon and the admin account is showing in the list.  Oh-oh, Jungo! On closer inspection all of the files were in place, just not the right place. I had created a mapped location and copied them to a drive letter, I copied them back to where they had come from, even copying the text from the from field. Everything was sitting comfortably in C:\Documents and Settings\Documents and Settings\All Users.

Fuck It.

When I fired up Opera all of my bookmarks were gone. All of the recent web marketing stuff - missing.

I went to the wrong location and copied back everything I was able to the right location.  It would have been fine had I not rebooted first then started the programs. No separate bookmark file, no backup, no favourites.

The laptop is still touchy about it's video and a firm hand on it's bottom (oo-er missus) will see it go off altogether.  All in all rather a large number of very unproductive hours.

In the middle of it all, a courier brought a new birthday bicycle for NoozeHoundette - which had been ordered in good time, confirmed by Amazon to have failed to meet delivery and estimated as being a month late then telling me yesterday it had been dispatched then arriving today for her birthday tomorrow - which was more than a tad fortuitous.

It may have been a big cardboard box, but it had a picture accompanying the words 'Girls 20" Bicycle' pasted in a 10-inch square on the side of it. "Oh please Daddy! Please Daddy!"

Frankly, had she a fuller appreciation of the circumstances of my work so far that day she would have pleaded with me to enlist help in assembling her new pink delight. Fortunately for her the instructions were classified idiot-proof and she was practising up and down the road in no time.

Well, Celtic fans, whilst by no means done and dusted I don't fancy your chances.

Welcome to the disappointment.