Working My Way Back to You

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Okay, more or less back on line. With an experimental new setup that was far too many eyestrain headaches in the making. And still a bit unreliable.

Quotes will be at the top again when I get my quotefile back. Yes, I left it round someone's house when fixing their computer.

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It's my father's birthday. I'm not quite sure how old he is, but it's probably 72. We marked the occasion with a giant multiflavoured takeaway curry - and three hours later, we're all still immobile with indigestion.

I was supposed to meet up with MK for some amour de bouche, but he'd somehow managed to get sixteen pints of beer down his gorge, so was also incapacitated.

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Here's a computer maintenence tip for anyone who, like me, has multiple operating systems on the same computer, on different partitions:

When defragmenting one partition's OS from inside another, delete the first OS's page file first. It's easily done, just like deleting any other file. That way, you won't waste time defragging the page file, and when it reappears when you boot up in the defragged OS, it'll be neat and unfragmented anyway.

And if those two paragraphs meant absolutely nothing to you, you computer could probably do with the attentions of someone like, well, me for instance.

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Yes, I now have three versions of Windows XP running on this laptop. One is a third the size of a standard installation, with all the useless guff cleared out to make it run faster. One is stripped down even more, specialised for sound processing. And the third...is a standard installation, just in case the other's fall over later.

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Eight days ago I asked the head of the Bulgarian language school when I could start, and he said "Definitely within the next fourteen days."

Yesterday I asked for an update and he said "When the apartment is vacant." So, I'm basically waiting on a tennant to move out, which may or may not be encouraging.

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David has sent me a rather lovely book, all the way from across the pond. "Wired Michigan" is a compendium of all that's unexplained, ghostly, or just plain ideosyncratic around his home ground.

Sightings of strange animals, decidedly eccentric local folk, highly personalised architecture, rather a lot of ghosts and the occasional mass murderer.

So that's my bedtime reading - I'm thinking some of it would be good for my students, when the finally appear.

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I bumped into Ralph today. Like seemingly everyone else in Britain, he's sick of the way the country's going and is casting around for some clearly identifiable cause - or failing that, someone to blame. And like a lot of people I've spoken to recently, would like to go somewhere else but can't.

His band - the nicely named "Retrobates" - should be recording soon, and I'll be interested to hear what they come up with.

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Another technical tip:

If you're typing up a blog entry while your computer is doing something experimental and possibly dangerous in the background, especially if it's turning into a long and thought provoking essay...

...save it somewhere safe, or else you may find it vanishes when your computer crashes and loses all data, And then you'll have to bash your head against the wall for a bit, which no one wants.

I'm just saying.

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