Monthly Archives: December 2006

Goodbye

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Apparently the upcoming year is going to see a great increase in the number of blogs published. Well I’ve had one for years, and quite frankly don’t ever manage to express what I mean. I’m too worried about who might be reading and what they might think. When in fact probably no one is reading. So in the upcoming year I will probably be posting less.

It all seems a bit futile writing an online diary when it doesn’t quite hold the same anonymity of a real diary. At least with a real diary you can hide it somewhere and hopefully no one will find it. With this, everyone who knows me knows who I am which kind of limits what can be said.

As years go, its been pretty crap, it started off ok but rapidly returned to the usual dullness of the previous years, so hopefully next year will be better. If you want to know how its going, then talk to me because I won’t be writing about it here.

Goodbye and Merry Christmas.

Setting the record straight

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Firstly because I messed up my joke last night, here it is again in all its glory:

A Sydney construction site

An Italian, an Irishman and a Chinese fellow are hired at a Sydney construction site. The foreman points to a huge pile of sand and says to the Italian guy, “You’re in charge of sweeping.” To the Irishman he says “You’re in charge of shovelling.” To the Chinese guy, “You’re in charge of supplies.” He then says, “Now, I have to leave for a little while. I expect you guys to make a dent in that there pile.” So the foreman goes away for a couple hours, but when he returns the pile of sand is untouched. He says to the Italian: “Why didn’t you sweep any of it?” The Italian replies in a heavy accent, “I no gotta broom, an’ you tella me dat de Chinese’a guy supposa bringa da supplies, but he disappear and I no finda him.” Then the foreman turns to the Irishman and asks why he didn’t shovel. The Irishman replies in his heavy brogue, “Aye, that ye did, but I couldn’t get meself a shovel. Ye left the Chinese fella in charge of supplies, but I couldn’t fin’ him.” The foreman is really angry now, and storms off looking for the Chinese guy. He can’t find him anywhere and is getting angrier by the minute. Just then, the Chinese guy springs out from behind the pile of sand and yells… “Supplies!!”

Finally on the subject of cheese pasties/pies it seemed to be a big surprise to everyone that they weren’t made from 100% cheese. It was almost as thought they’d never tasted one before. Yes if you didn’t know then a major component in a Greggs cheese and onion pasty is potato!

Paranoia

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So a few months ago I bought 50 blank DVD-R’s, they seemed to work OK, burning without error and as far as I was aware producing a perfect copy every time. So having ran out of disks I bought a further 200 of these disks so that I can do some serious backing up over the festive period. An unforeseen problem has occurred. Even though they write OK, when I come to read them they keep having errors on them. After trying different CD burning software software, simulating before burning and verifying the data after its been written I was still having problems.

The final option was to try a firmware upgrade, it turns out that I was still using firmware version A301 rather than then newest version A306, support for the RITEK disks I’m using was added in version A302. The upgrade does allow me to write at 8x speed rather than the previous 4x speed, although the actual final disk is yet to be produced so I’m yet to discover if my problem is solved or if I need to look for a new home for the remaining 190 disks.

My major worry now is for the data quality on my previous 50 disks, have I deleted data from my PC to free up disk space thinking its securely backed up when in fact its actually just stored on a load of old coasters, I guess only time will tell.