Blog/March 2018/Mar 16th

Mar 16th

I had a bit of a frustrating week. On Sunday I discovered that my main development machine’s hard-disk was giving up the ghost after some 4+ years. That’s a bit like finding out that your car’s brakes aren’t working: it’s something to take care of ASAP before you have an accident.

The problem meant that I couldn’t use that machine to do work, since it wasn’t even booting properly. So I had to use my laptop instead (B”H, I could do that!), while I ordered a new hard-disk for the main machine. In the meantime, I figured I would run a complete disk diagnostic and maybe fix the problem. No dice.

Instead of having the new disk delivered, I opted for store pick-up — since I figured it would be faster to do so. It wasn’t. The disk only arrived at the store on Tuesday, and I couldn’t pick it up until Wednesday. That day, I had an errand to do with mom, so after that we went to the store to pick up the disk. I hate going to that store, they work so slowly; but their prices are usually the best…

When we got home, I immediately dumped mom on the floor and ran upstairs to set up the new disk. But I had to try to recover the data from the old one and put it on the new. Fortunately, I was able to do that, but it took a lot of time. Thursday was spent almost entirely on data recovery and system set-up. But in the end, all was well. I tried again to resuscitate the old disk, but it wasn’t having any of that. No worries, I’ve got a working system again running my preferred OS.

Stuff and nonsense:

• “National Geographic” is virtue-signalling.
• The famous physicist Stephen Hawking died this week. All over the ‘net people were saying, “RIP Stephen Hawking”. But since he contended that God doesn’t exist nor is there an afterlife, I wonder just what Hawking would have thought of the RIP wishes. He was also a bit of a dick, but one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, even if they were nasty while alive.
• The UK detained a young Canadian woman under the “Section 7 Terrorism Act” and banned her from entry, even though they knew she wasn’t a terrorist or any kind of threat. Watch the video and mourn for Britannia.
• An Israeli Christian Arab joined the Zehut party. That’s right, an Arab joined the “Israel is a Jewish state” party.
• And: you might want to rethink buying a Ford car.
• Finally, the pizza place we like has a website. But there’s something terribly wrong with the image at the top of the page… can you guess what?

In the past, I’ve mentioned the importance of “backups”. My preferred method is to keep my important data redundantly, on several machines, and in Fossil repositories. That’s fine for the important data, but does nothing to preserve the actual system setup. Setting up a new system to be the same as the old system is a more painful thing, and now I’m going to make sure I have “emergency recovery” backups so I can get back up and running more quickly. At least I was able to do my clients’ work using my laptop…

This week the weather’s been hovering around the usual for springtime in the Middle East. Cool one day, warm the next. Today’s going to be on the cool side, but we’ve got a warm-up coming starting on shabbat and extending into the next week. Mom will like that!

Sarah is joining us this shabbat! We’ll serve up:
orange soup, roast beef, veggies, stuffed Portobello mushrooms, some kind of potatoes, salatim, and chocolate chip cookies.

Until next time,
shabbat shalom and ḥodesh ṭov!

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