Monday.  September 11th.  Lest we forget.  Busy day.  Spent over an hour on the phone working out some naming schemes and procedures.  Leftover fricassee for dinner.

Tuesday.  Busy day.  Fixing problems.  Looking at another server migration.  Leftover fricassee for dinner.

Wednesday.  Busy day.  More server migration and naming scheme work.  Leftover fricassee for dinner.  Finished labelling food and hotels from Europe trip.

Thursday.  Dunno.  Stuff.

Friday.  Awake for nearly two hours stressing about All The Things.  Because I was hot.  The world is hot.  We're all going to die.  Probably by starvation.  Because the weather will destroy food crops.  Knocked off work early and did a bunch of tidying and some music.  Picked up the sweetie (an hour late) then pizza for dinner and an early night.

Saturday.  Slept ok.  Had to deal with on call crap twice in te morning and twice in the evening sigh.  Had breakfast with Katie and Andrew at Little Bird.  I had the slow cooked pulled pork benedict which was .. interesting..

Then house stuff, panorama labelling and started Starry Night.  Sausages for dinner then Ahsoka ep 4.  Started watching Elemental but only got half an hour in before on call crap stopped that.  Sigh.

The purple poppies are out weeks earlier than last year too..

Sunday.  More late night alerts after I went to bed sigh.  But managed to sleep ok.  Then another day of all the things.  

It got to like 24 again today.  And it's supposed to be 28 tomorrow and Tuesday.  It's completely mental for September.  And Apple is daft.  I finally got around to figuring out how to authorise this computer to my phone.  That done, it said I was using five out of five.  But the only way to clear out other computers to deauth *all* of them.  Hopeless.  And this week I finally started from the beginning of Jamie and Julia (I'd seen a whole heap at random but decided to go through them methodically).  Did you know you can't watch a YouTube playlist in actual chronological order?  So I keep having to override the video selection if I want to watch from oldest to newest.  Dumb dumb dumb.  

Slept really well which was nice.

We hung out with Jeff and Ruth for a while and watched all the rainbow lorikeets having their breakfast.  Funny little birds, it's a pity we don't get them in Canberra.

Midmorning Jeff dropped us off at Little Bay so we could do the walk up to Trial Bay Goal.  In fact we'd done this walk before - last time we were here - just in reverse.

Jeff picked us up and we headed back for a lovely bbq lunch.

After lunch we helped Ruth with her laptop.  She is *exactly* like my Mum when it comes to computers.. hrmmm

Had a bit of a rest, then went to Trial Bay Beach for a swim.  Caught this adorable little crab.

Then headed back.

Had some snacks and drinks with Jeff and Ruth, then went down to the flat to rest and have some dinner (Ruth had left some lefover chicken stirfry).  Then I went up to watch the Masterchef Junior finale with Jeff (Ruth had gone to Bible study).

Then to bed.

Tuesday morning woke up at 4:38 and never got back to sleep.  Hurrah.  Made a broccoli bake for dinner, will post that separately.  Evening was just UK photo labelling and an early night.

Tuesday night I slept somewhat better.  Stu didn't.  Le sigh.  Wednesday evening cooked chicken kiev and got up to 2794 UK photos labelled.  

Also in the evening David and I were on our computers when a possum walked onto the window sill outside the study window and looked in at us.  Twice!  (but not quite long enough for either of us to get a photo of it either time.  Possum was playing possum it was! ;) ).  As I went to bed I had that feeling again that our bedroom is a place I go to *not* sleep :(

Thursday.  Well I had a nice early night on Wednesday, but didn't get to sleep for FOUR HOURS.  Fricken hurrah.  David did very nicely go and satisfy a craving I had for Country Cheeses with cheese spread ;)  I haven't had Country Cheeses with cheese spread in probably about fifteen years.  I stopped eating them because, sodium.

The fog on Thursday took til about lunchtime to clear.  Then it came back.  At like 4:30pm ?!?  So weird!!

Evening was pizza and the first two episodes of Space Force.  The boys were cacking themselves.  I thought it was dumb.

Friday.  Awake for a while from 12:20 then up from 5:30.  Fog was gone.  Weird, because I thought it would be as thick as you could imagine.  Got up to 1400 of Dad's slides scanned.  I really hope Mum can find the book David thinks exists with details of all the slides, otherwise all this effort will be for naught - as the slides I'm scanning are not labelled other than a general topic and month/year in another book I have.  I mean some photos are pretty obvious what they are, and a month/year is sufficient, but so many photos are just a mystery what they are.

For lunch I cooked up some leftover rice with peas/corn, ham, soy, sesame oil, and a bit of leftover parsnip.  I let it get hot and a bit crunchy so that was really nice.  Really must learn how to cook paella.

In the evening we left work a little early and headed out to the club - first time we'd been out there since March.  We got the fire going and had some wine and some leftover pulled pork and had a very nice and quiet evening together.

Saturday morning Stu went to the committee meeting, and I spent the entire morning cleaning and organising the van.  Didn't get everything done on the todo list, but did clear out a heap of stuff.  Pity I didn't take any before/after photos!

Came home in the afternoon but didn't really do much.  Saw this dog saying hi on the way home.

Sausages for dinner and we watched Attack of the Clones.  I'd forgotten just how bad it is.  So much of the dialogue is completely cringeworthy.  I still have no idea how *anyone* would fall in love with petulant teenager Anakin.  So dumb.  

Any guesses what these are? :)

This morning I took a bootload of stuff to the Green Shed.  Mostly from the van, but also this little candle holder I bought when I first moved out of home in 2000.  It's very pretty and in a completely darkened room you can see the stars.  But in a normally lit room you can't actually see the candle from most angles, which makes it a bit of a waste.  I've only ever used a few times in the past twenty years, so thought it may as well go.

This afternoon I did get a bit more done on the todo list, and we had (will have - it's nearly done!) chicken cordon bleu for dinner.

Just a few books I've read over the past few months.

Heaven is for Real - Todd Burpo.  A book Mum lent me a couple of years ago but hadn't gotten around to reading.  Read this one in bed.  Whether to believe as-is or not, it was a great read.  I'd like to see the movie although apparently the movie focusses a lot more on the doubts of the father, which didn't really come across so much in the book.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and six more - Roald Dahl.  I bought this on Kangaroo Island in 1994 and have read it all before.  I don't think I've read it since actually seeing the Mildenhall Treasure though, so that was pretty cool.  

Silicon Snake Oil - Clifford Stoll.  I read and loved The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll years ago so looked forward to reading this.  Except the dude spend literally an entire book complaining about how hard to use and what a waste of space computers and the internet are.  And Facebook hadn't even been invented when he wrote it.  Honestly I have no idea how it got published.  Sure he had some good points (computers shouldn't/can't ever properly replace teachers) but some of his predictions were laughably bad (noone will ever bother to try and hack databases because they're all different and rely on people to enter the data correctly, and video streaming will be too hard to ever achieve).  I really should have taken more photo snippets like this, but I ain't going back to find them again!

bwhahahah - omfg a quarter of a megabyte or more for a picture is b-i-i-i-g-g-g!

I slogged my way through to the end of it, but it was many hours of my life I won't get back.

Little Brother - Cory Doctorow.  I used to read Boing Boing and remember when this first came out (I remember he published it online for free).  Stu actually bought a copy so I read it before bed recently.  Basically an essay on privacy wrapped in a pretty good story.  I really enjoyed it.  It's over ten years old now, but just as topical as ever.

Adrian Mole - the Cappuccino Years - Sue Townsend.  I read The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 years ago and I think I enjoyed it.  So picked this one up at a Bookcrossing meetup years ago, thinking it was an adult sequel.  I started reading it a few years ago on one of our trips to Queensland.  Problem is I just couldn't get into it.  And it certainly didn't help that I had to keep referring to the index of characters just to figure out who was who.  As it turns out it was the fifth book of the Adrian Mole series.  Maybe it would all make a lot more sense if I read them all together in quick succession.  Anyway after sitting on the shelf for years I gave up on it and put it back in the pile of Bookcrossing books I need to give away.  

So the weekend.  Where was I?

Had a crap crap crap day today. 

A simple oversight (basically from me not RTFM) caused hours of stress while I tried to figure out why something wasn't working :(  Complete waste of time, and it was all my fault :(

The computer shop didn't have a screwdriver capable of opening the faulty Seagate disk (enclosure).  This is a disk that was dying with bad sectors so we took it back to Officeworks where we bought it, but they said it was fine and gave it back to us.  It was *not* fine, and subsequent attempts to format it resulted in all sorts of horrible noises coming out of it.  But because Officeworks is a pain in the rear end to get to, and we'd left it so long, and we hate that sort of thing, we never ended up getting it replaced.  So just want to rip the thing out of its enclosure and replace it with something else.  If we can get the screws out.  Have left it with them, they are going to see what they can do.

Spent the evening fighting with hard drives and computers.  Discovered I could have actually mounted the external hard drive with a writable ntfs mount.  If I'd done that it would have been much easier to get the files off it now.

Basically a grumpy crappy day :(

So today I thought I'd install windows updates.  I started the process, but left it as we decided to go shopping.  When we got home the computer apparently had restarted with some error. (There might also have been an error about disk space, but the computer had six gig free).  I didn't think too much about this, and ran windows update again.  It did stuff like install IE 8 so it was definitely doing something.  It got to the end and wanted to restart, however it said there was a failed patch and gave an error code, which to be honest I didn't pay too much attention to, I just thought I'd try again after a restart.  Now to complicate matters, I'd also attached a new USB hub, but I can't remember at what point I attached it - whether it was before or after I went shopping - but probably after.

So restarted. 

The Dell splash screen came up, but then got no further.  Tried hard booting it, same thing.  No response on keyboard.  So attached the keyboard to a real usb socket and disconnected the hub.  This time it got further, but restarted, and came up with a screen saying windows failed to load.  I could try again or run the setup repair.  Trying again didn't work so tried the setup repair.  It tried to repair errors, but still wouldn't boot.  Tried repairing again (actually a couple of times).  It decided to do chkdsks.  That didn't seem to go well.  Tried using the vista repair options.  Got a dos prompt and tried a manual chkdsk.  It finally complained about not having enough space to fix errors in hiberfil.sys.  Cleared some space and tried again.  This time it completed, but the setup repair still wouldn't work.  Only messages include things like "bad patch".  Tried restoring to a system restore point of the 23rd.  Still no luck.

At this point there seemed to be no other option than to reinstall windows.  I unpacked my system cds a while back, but really have no idea where I put all the cds.  Plus I'm always paranoid those things are just going to wipe your whole hard drive and restore a stock standard image.  So I thought this would be a good opportunity to try out Windows 7.  So Stu downloaded it and I just tried installing it.

Except it seems you have to be inside a working verison of windows vista to actually run the upgrade in place.

*sigh*

So looks like will have to do a custom install and start again.  Except I don't have the disk space to spare.  Not without deleting a bunch of stuff. 

Really need to get that file server up and running.....

Epic fail!