Mike's musings

An ex-disk

Got a new (80Gb) drive for my laptop from work a couple of months ago. Noticed at the end of last week that I was getting some smartd errors reported, which suggested some problems. Got home last night, turned it on to use it for my meeting with Keith, and, of the 2 times (out of 4) that it even completed booting, it was unusable, and Reiserfs was reporting all sorts of horrid, horrid errors. So, took it into work this morning, and Oli (our sysadmin guy) agrees that it's: a) broken; and b) not my fault. So we're trying to get as much off it as possible before letting a Seagate diagnostic app (which also agrees that it's got some nasty low-level errors) do its best to fix things. Unluckily, we're having to use a machine with a very slow USB bus, so it's really crawling (we've put the laptop drive on one of the PCI controllers from a desktop PC and are copying to a USB-connected external drive). The drive should be well within warranty, and I can still mount the relevant partitions, so I should be able to get most of what I need off it, but it's still a real pain.

Despite not having a laptop for it (which wasn't, if we're honest, really required - I was just going to fill out the "Training Agreement" pro forma while we talked), Keith and I had an interesting meeting. We agree a bunch of outcomes to aim for this year, and methods by which to try to achieve them: I'll write them up here when I have them to hand. I also gave Keith the URL of this blog so that he can have a look if he wants: hello, Keith!

Listened to quite a lot of music yesterday, but didn't get round to updating it. Don't have easy access to the information right now, but will try to get round to it later.

Music today

• Robert Ramsey / How are the mighty fallen - ??Cambridge Taverner Choir (What Is Our Life: Renaissance Laments and Elegies)
• Thomas Weelkes / When David heard - ??Cambridge Taverner Choir (What Is Our Life: Renaissance Laments and Elegies)
• Josquin Desprez / Nymphes des bois - ??Cambridge Taverner Choir (What Is Our Life: Renaissance Laments and Elegies)
• Pierre de la Rue / Doleo super te - ??Cambridge Taverner Choir (What Is Our Life: Renaissance Laments and Elegies)
• Desprez?/de la Rue? / Absalon fili mi - ??Cambridge Taverner Choir (What Is Our Life: Renaissance Laments and Elegies)
• Nicholas Gombert / Lugebat David Absalon - ??Cambridge Taverner Choir (What Is Our Life: Renaissance Laments and Elegies)
• Alonso Lobo / Versa est in luctum - ??Cambridge Taverner Choir (What Is Our Life: Renaissance Laments and Elegies)
• Ambrosio Cotes / Mortuus est Philippus rex - ??Cambridge Taverner Choir (What Is Our Life: Renaissance Laments and Elegies)

# posted by MikeCamel @ 5:58 pm