Ignore the experts

If there is one piece of advice I could give to anyone, it would be this: Ignore the experts.

For centuries, science (and religion, for that matter) has insisted it is right in many areas. As a result, people and governments make huge shifts in their lifestyles and policies, with far-reaching consequences. And then, a few years down the line, it turns out that they were wrong after all.

The earth is flat. Oops, sorry, it's not.
The sun revolves around the earth. Whoops, changed our minds.
Cigarettes are good for you. Ok, maybe they cause cancer.
The atom is the smallest thing in the universe. Oh dear, we seem to have broken one and found all sorts of other crap inside.
Tea is good/bad/good/bad/good/bad/good for you. Pick your month.
And then today; Vitamin supplements actually increase the risk of a premature death.

Great, so all those people diligently following the advice of the scientists and doctors are now more likely to die early.

And they somehow expect us to believe them about our effect on Global Warming(TM)?

Running out of patience...

Yet, again, things did not go according to plan...

The trial version of the Acronis software didn't let you do half the stuff, so we bought a copy to download. No biggie, it's only $50.

So I started plugged the old drive and a new drive into my PC (thereby bypassing the RAID card), booted off the True Image boot disk and set it cloning. Here is the first snag. It was going to take 6 hours.

We decided that we didn't fancy waiting until 2am for it to finish, so I left it going and went back in the morning before work, expecting it to have finished. But it hadn't. Instead, it had completely frozen and locked up the computer with... ready? 1 minute, 32 seconds left to go...

There are no words not classified by the Oxford English Dictionary as vulgar to describe my feelings this morning.

I tried booting from it anyway, but it didn't work, unsuprisingly.

So now I'm going to try creating an image of the old drive onto a new drive and then restoring that image, but I've a feeling it's not going to work. That'll be the job for Friday evening and then I'll see the results on Saturday morning. If it creates the image I'll set it restoring the image to another drive. I'll see the results of that on Sunday morning.

I really hate computers.

Patience, part III

Guess what? Things didn't go according to plan...

I put the new Seagate drive in, went to connect the power and realised it only has SATA power connectors, not a standard IDE one as well. I had to run out to PC-World to get two convertors but they didn't have any. So I went to another PC-World and they didn't have any either. Whilst en-route back to the office I stopped off at home to see if I had one. Amazingly, I did. Still one short, but it'd do for now.

So I connected the new drive up and set it rebuilding. It failed. This now gives me irrefutable proof that at least some of the problem is with the remaining Western Digital drive.

So.... tonight I'm taking my own PC in (as it has SATA connectors - and I bought another power adaptor at lunchtime today from a computer shop down the road). Plan is to put the dodgy Western Digital drive in and a new Seagate drive in and use Acronis True Image (free 15 day trial - very handy!) to make a sector-by-sector image onto the Seagate drive. Hopefully this will work. It might not be able to read the file-system of the drive properly because it's half of a RAID array, but it claims to work with unknown filesystems in this method, as it literally does it sector-by-sector so it shouldn't matter. I can boot off a CD into True Image, usefully bypassing Windows. Then I can remove the WD drive and install the other Seagate drive and restore the image to that one. Then plug that one back into the server and see what happens. If it works, great, I can put the other Seagate drive in and have it rebuild the RAID. If it doesn't work because the RAID is messed up, then I'm screwed and I'll have to restore Windows... I really want to avoid doing that. But if I do have to I'll get a better RAID card first!

Still, at least I switched their internet access over whilst I was there from BT ADSL (boo!) to Telewest cable (yay!) which should be far more stable.

I hate computers.

Patience, part II

Recently I've blogged about upgrading my mother's computer, which required a great deal of patience.

Even more patience is required when trying to fix the server at Ele's work.

They have a single server, with a 2-disk RAID1 array. This means all the data is written to both hard drives at the same time, giving them fault tolerance in the event of a disk failure. They were getting a lot of server crashing, so I went in to have a look. Sure enough, one of the drives had failed. I did a verification on it and it passed, so I tried to rebuild the drive from the other one. This failed.

At this point I gave up and ordered another identical drive to replace it. This arrived the next day, so I went back to her office, installed it and tried to rebuild again. This also failed. This was now a rather bigger problem. After a lot of searching around on t'internet, I discovered that this exact model of drive is basically incompatible with the RAID controller (which is also pretty rubbish, according to most reports). Great. It was a miracle it's lasted this long. FYI Western Digital SATA drives with a serial number ending in JD are not compatible with an Adaptec 1210SA RAID controller. It's due to a retry mechanism in the drive that causes a timeout on the RAID card, apparantly.

So, the next day I hot-footed it to PC-World after work to see what I could get there. They had some Hitachi drives and nothing else. I was really after Seagate, but was wanting to get the server fixed quickly, as it's harming their business a bit. So I bought 2 Hitachi drives, with the intention of rebuilding to one drive, then ripping out the remaining WD one and rebuilding back to the second Hitachi.

So I put the first one in, the RAID BIOS saw it fine, initialised it, booted to Windows, ran the Adaptec Storage Manager program (getting hold of that is hard enough if you don't know the serial number of your card!) and it didn't appear there.

A lot more searching revealed that that drive, too, is not compatible with this card. Great. Out of all the drives in the world, I had managed to buy the only two that don't work. So now we've ordered the Seagate ones and tonight I'm going to try again. But I'm still not convinced that the problem doesn't lie with the remaining WD drive meaning that tonight's rebuild will also fail. If it does, we're basically reduced to re-installing Windows, unless I can do something tricky by breaking the RAID, putting the WD drive into my own computer, ghosting it to an image, ghosting that back to a Seagate drive and rebuilding a RAID from that one.

Fun times. At least I'm getting paid for it!

Variety is the spice of life

I like to vary what I do at the weekends. This Sunday I did this:

Got up at 5am.
Drove to Heathrow.
Picked up Damian, Maggie & Louis (Damian is Ele's brother. You can figure out the rest yourselves).
Drove to Anastasia's house (Maggie's mum) to drop them off and have a cup of tea.
Drove home.
Drove to my parent's house.
Drove them to Heathrow.
Drove home.
Drove to Tesco's.
Drove home.
Drove to Anastasia's house. Watched the football, ate dinner, chatted etc.
Drove home.
Went to bed.

Now if the various parties concerned had co-ordinated their arrivals and departures a bit better, half of this would have been unneccessary. If my parents had had a 9am flight, or if Damian & Maggie had arrived at 10am rather than 5:30am I could have driven my parents to the airport and picked up the others in one go. This would have been far more sensible, but of course it didn't work like that.

I now have 7 airport-free days until next Monday, when I have to go pick up my parents again.

Weird day

Today has been a weird day.

I had hardly any sleep last night because Joe decided that crying was better than being asleep (I think the poor boy is teething), so I was really tired this morning.

I've got Ele's company's server on my mind, which has had a major disk failure that I'm having to sort out. And then when I get in to work I discover that the company I work for has been sold (signed at about 5am this morning). And then within about an hour of hearing this a major (and I mean major) bid we've just won (a household name haulage company) called up and completely changed the entire scope of the project and wanted an answer back today.

So now I work for a different firm. It's not a merger, but the "entity" has been purchased and will be run under a different parent company. Our name will change, because it has the old parent company name in it. The good bit is that the new firm (I think 4 companies in total, including us) is entirely focused on tracking and telematics. So now we're going to enter a strange period where on one hand it's business as usual, and on the other hand we try to achieve some synergies (alert, management speak!) with the other entities in our universe. As long as those synergies don't mean that I'm out of a job I don't mind.

The major project looks like it might be in addition to what we were proposing to the major new customer, which is good because it means all our current stuff doesn't have to be chucked out, but bad because it's quite complex.

And Ele's company's server is proving to be a nightmare. I'm hoping I can get a couple of new suitable disks from PC-World after work today and that it'll all rebuild it's RAID nicely, but it might not. If I can't get the disks I have to order them last minute from somewhere for a saturday delivery and try and do it over the weekend. But it's not guaranteed to work, and if it doesn't then it'll mean a complete server rebuild, reinstalling Windows, setting up the network and the Active Directory from scratch, reinstalling all applications, putting the data back and so on. This is a huge job, and they are desperate to get it done, as it's hard to run their business without it. I've advised a rethink of their systems (a server in a cupboard is not ideal!) with some investment into IT. They think the same, fortunately, so we'll have a think about how to improve things.

At least I'm invoiving them handsomely for my time!

Not pleasant reading

A couple of weeks ago, Ele decided that as we both are the correct weight for our respective heights - but only if we are pregnant hippos rather than humans - that we could do with losing some weight.

I groaned at this, naturally, envisaging a diet of lettuce leaves and early morning runs around the park.

Fortunately, she had a far better idea. A special "Slimming Tea" from the Chinese Medicine shop. Now I'm naturally skeptical of these sorts of things, especially when I discovered that two months' supply was to cost about £40, but the woman in the shop explained that you don't have to do any exercise or any dieting. At hearing this, my wallet pinged open and a transaction was done, although I did have nagging doubts that the reason it would work was because you now couldn't actually afford to buy any food.

So we tried this tea. You don't add milk, of course, but I am adding a sugar to it, as otherwise I would not be able to drink it. At first, the taste was horrible but now I'm getting used to it. You only have to drink it once per day, so it's not too bad.

It is now that I should inform you to stop reading, because it gets rather disgusting from here.

But now I have discovered the way in which it works. To put it crudely; it makes you shit. I'm now going to the toilet about 3 or 4 times per day to empty myself of runny brown stuff. And it smells bad. Worse than normal, I mean.

But it does seem to work. I have lost some weight since I started drinking the stuff, and so has Ele.

And we don't have to diet, so I'm happy with that.

Valentine's Day

Today, as you will know, either a result of buying a present or having to deal with the rage of a woman because you didn't buy one, is Valentine's day. If you didn't know, I suggest you stop off on your way home and buy something, or else you may be spending the evening in the hospital.

Ele and I decided that because Valentine's is just a stupid commercial thing designed purely to make the greetings card people money, that we wouldn't buy each other cards this year. I made the gallant point that I love her every day of the year and don't need a special day in which to show it. In any case, our anniversary is a far more significant event. Fortunately, she agreed.

So I was shocked yesterday when I received an email from her asking me what I was getting her.

Apparantly, although we are of the opinion that it is commercial nonsense, and that we weren't buying cards, she was still expecting a present. Worse, she had already got me one which meant there was no chance of talking her out of it. I had to goto the supermarket on the way home.

In there I noticed that there was an aisle that had one side dedicated to Valentine's products. On the other side of the aisle were vacuum cleaners. It reminded me of an email I had received from a colleague.

I got my wife a new belt and a new bag for Valentine's...
... now the Hoover works a treat!

Be warned - do not try this at home!

More enviro-madness

Apparantly the past twelve months, as measured on a rolling basis (i.e. Feb 2006 to Feb 2007), have been the warmest twelve months since records began a few hundred years ago.

Do you know how much warmer it was? 3 degrees? 2 degrees? Nope. 0.1 degree Celcius. 0.1! Follow standard rounding rules and you get 0 anyway.

And obviously, since the earth is inexorably warming up, the previous record would have been the previous rolling twelve months, right? Jan 2006 to Jan 2007? Well, no. Ok, well in the past couple of years then? No? Past five years? Past ten years? Nope. You have to go back to 1994-5 to get the next-hottest twelve month period, which was of course a meagre 0.1 degrees difference to the current blockbuster.

Global warming. Only because of the amount of hot air politicians and greenies are generating.

All you need is just a little patience...

When upgrading computers (more accurately, putting bits of an old one into a new one and getting it all up and running and transferring all the data across), you need knowledge, experience, a screwdriver and most importantly - lots and lots of patience. You also need to keep thinking of ways around a problem when you are thwarted at every turn.

Case in point; my mum's computer was running slow. It's several years old now and I suggested that rather than buying more RAM, that she buy a new PC. For £250 she could get a barebones system far more powerful than her current one, with a new hard disk and a DVD-writer as well. She agreed to this so I ordered the bits. This weekend I went over to put them in, armed with my laptop, a screwdriver and several CD's, including the one I made back in November to get Ele's dad's Windows XP OEM product key to work with my retail upgrade CD.

First step, remove the floppy drive from the old PC and put it in the new one. The new hard disk is a SATA drive, which means you have to give XP a floppy with a driver on it to get it to see it. So I take the old floppy drive out and put it in the new one, and install the new hard disk and DVD writer. Fine. Then I look for the driver disk. Only there isn't one. You have to create it yourself from the motherboard CD.

Sigh... putting the floppy drive back in and booting the old machine is not a possibility, beacuse that machine takes about 20 mins to boot up and become usable. My laptop doesn't have a floppy drive, and neither does my mum's laptop. My mum then realised that my sister's laptop has one, so we got that and put the motherboard CD in. Only it wouldn't read it. Taking it out revealed the problem - an inch-long crack in it.

So I pulled out my laptop and connected to the wireless network that someone local had kindly given me permission to use. By this I mean "failed to secure", of course. Only the network wasn't there, like it normally is. Eventually I discovered that moving my laptop to the kitchen window got a signal from it. A quick search gave me the SATA drivers, along with everything else on the CD like the video drivers, etc. I downloaded the SATA drivers and copied them to my USB key, transferred this to my sister's laptop and extracted the files.

They extracted to a folder called NVRAID. In here, was another folder called NVRAID. Inside that one, was another folder called NVRAID. I was getting severe Russian-doll syndrome and wondering if I was stuck inside some infinite loop, but then hit a folder called Raid Floppy. Inside there was another folder called 32-bit. Inside there, my quest was complete and the .exe file was found. I ran it and it said:

The data of the disk will be of the formatting! Irrevocable data loss will be occuring on the Driver A:!

Very Engrish. So I created the disk, plugged in the new PC and started the XP setup. Then I got distracted and forgot to hit F6 to give Setup the drivers. So it was a big suprise when Setup could see the hard-disk anyway, and I didn't actually need the disk after all.

Argh.

Apparantly the motherboard does some trickery, making a SATA drive appear as a normal IDE drive. This is the same motherboard that I put in Arthur's new PC, and that didn't do this, so I guess it's a newer BIOS or something.

Anyway, the rest of it went smoothly and no further irritations ensued. Gotta love computers.


BOOTNOTE - I've just come out of a meeting, and in an attempt to stop people using permanant markers on the dry-erase board, somebody had written "Do not use non-permanant markers on this board!" Not quite sure they got that right...

It's snow joke, this climate change.

Ok, I apologise for the horrendous title. And I'm not implying that because it snowed, Global Warming (TM) isn't happening, because that's just a stupid thing to say.

Yesterday we awoke to find a blanket of brilliant white cloaking everything. Jess went out to build a snowman and, as soon as she had finished, the dog went over, sniffed, and lifted his leg on it.

She didn't have to goto school, either. With a remarkable piece of foresight, the school had a couple of months ago designated the day as a Parent/Teacher Consultation Day, which means there is no school for the kids, barring a 30-minute appointment where we learn how good/bad she is doing. Our appointment was not until 6pm so she had the whole day to play in the snow. Her report was generally good, so we got a pizza for dinner.

I wasn't even that late for work. Last month when it snowed I left at 08:30 and got in at 10:15. Yesterday I left at 09:00 and got in at 09:30 which wasn't bad at all. I think waiting for some of the traffic to dissipate was a good idea.


Today I read about how Richard Branson is going to provide some huge prize fund for the person who can work out the best way of removing C02 from the atmosphere. Scientists want to remove 1 billion tons of the stuff.

Hang on. We really don't know for certain that increased CO2 does anything bad. More to the point, we don't know if removing the stuff from the atmosphere will do anything bad, either. Scientists have been known to be wrong in the past. They used to think the earth was the center of the solar system, and that the earth was flat. The atom is the smallest thing, remember? There is always a damn good chance that they are wrong about this, too. Global weather is impossible to model, because it is just so complex. We don't have the knowledge yet to make informed decisions.

Then again, if removing CO2 from the atmosphere does suddenly prove that we should have left it alone because it's all going screwy, then it'll have to be put back. Then hybrid cars will have loads of tax, petrol will be discounted and grants will be given for fitting V8 engines. Hurrah! Driving might become fun.

But I'd rather they didn't monkey around without knowing what they were doing, when it is something that affects us all.

Exposure to this colleague may cause irritation

What do you do when a colleague walks over to your desk, carrying an armful of equipment which he proceeds to dump onto your desk in a manner which suggests he intends you to make it work?

For this is what happened yesterday. There I was, minding my own business, when a bunch of kit gets dumped onto my desk. I decided to keep shtum and just carrying on with what I was doing in the hope that he might go away again, but unfortunately he didn't.

Said colleague fiddled with various bits for a few minutes, before finally asking if I had such-and-such. I've got such-and-such, I replied, but I haven't got a so-an-so to go with it.

Further conversation, and me stopping what I was doing (ok, ok, what I was supposed to be doing, even though I wasn't actually doing it at the time) ensued. About an hour later, we were done.

Now I wouldn't mind if he had walked over and said "Do you mind having a look at this?"; I'd have said yes. But not to be given an option I thought was a bit rude.


Later on, in the evening, there was a knock at the door from a courier firm who were delivering a bookcase-type thing for Joe that we had ordered. The conversation went like this:

Courier: "Sign here, please." handing me a clipboard with a delivery sheet on it.
Me: "Er, that's not my name, nor my address"
Courier: Checks package, "ah, you're Mr. X. What road is this?"
Me: "X Street"
Courier: "Ah, don't have a sticker for that. Sign there anyway."
Me: "I'm not signing next to someone else's name and address."
Courier: "Well, you'll have to."
Me: "No I won't. Get me something else to sign."
Courier: "But it's dark and I've parked awkwardly and it's cold and my feet are sore and there's a little bit of rain in the air and I really don't want to write a few words on another sheet."
Me: "Tough tits, I'm not signing for delivery next to somebody eles's name and address."
Courier: "Fine." Stomps off to car in a huff, returning and making a big show of filling in the sheet.
Me: "Thank you!"
Courier: "Bye, wanker."

Or something like that.

Whilst this was going on, Ele and Jess were tending to the dinner. Jess managed to leave a spoon in a dish which she put in the microwave and Ele managed to set fire to some paper that had been conveniently left next to the gas hob on the oven. However, the house didn't burn down and the microwave didn't explode nor trip out all the fuses in the house, so we'll call it a successful dinner.

Not the world's most interesting blog entry, but I'm feeling unwell so that's all you're getting.

The village idiot

In the local paper there was an article, complete with photograph and everything - taking up about half a page - concerning.... a man and his daughter's birthday party.

I don't blame the local paper for printing such a pointless story - like any local rag they are desperate for stories (much like the typer of this rambling nonsense), but what I don't get is why the man felt sufficiently outraged to contact the paper.

The man had booked a birthday party for his daughter at a local bowling alley. A few days after booking, he received a telephone call saying that unfortunately a mistake had been made and he shouldn't have been able to book this date. The reason? Not a standard double-booking, but rather the fact that the England Junior team are holding a competetion on this day and need the whole center.

Rather than saying "Oh, ok." and booking one of the other two alleys within 2 miles, or moving it to a different day, he clambered up onto his considerably high horse and galloped off to the Office of Fair Trading and the local newspaper.

Seriously, how demented do you need to be to do this? They gave him his deposit back and offered to host it on a different day instead. Ok, he had sent out invitations but a few phone calls would sort this out, as would getting his daughter to hand out notes to her friends.

Her birthday is not "ruined" as he described. It simply needs to be held on a different day, or at a different center. One of the other centers is far more suited to kids birthday parties anyway. And they give you free invitations to hand out (at least they did a few years ago).

He said he is going to turn up on the day with all 17 children and make the center "fit us in". Ok, I'm sure the England junior squad will be happy for you to ruin their tournament. The fact that they will have travelled from all over the country, incurring considerable costs, will not matter. In fact, why not just scrap the whole tournament on the day. At least you get to have your go.

I'm considering going to the bowl on the day he is going to be turning up. It should be a good laugh.

What a great example he's setting:
Man - "Don't worry, honey, I'm not letting those corporate bastards ruin your birthday party! Daddy will sort out. Just you see."
Wife - "Darling, why don't we just do it the weekend after, or do it at the bigger and better center down the road?"
Man - "No! I'm not giving in to the corporate monster! To hell with those 300 kids and their stupid national competition! My baby is going to get her game!"
Wife - "Really, darling, aren't you getting a bit worked up about this?"
Man - "Hell, no! I'm going to the press, and the OfT"
Wife - "Isn't this teaching our daughter an example of how not to react to a situation?"
Man - "You're on their side! I don't believe it! My own wife!"
Daughter - "Stop fighting! I don't care what day it is or where it is, I just want to have a bowling party!"
Man - "You'll get it honey, you'll get it..."

Good to know the village idiot is still alive and kicking.