Happy New Year

I hope everyone had a good festive season. It's back to work for me, so holiday's over. I've been reading a lot of short stories lately, the latest, Crimewave (11), dropped through my letterbox today and I've dipped into it already. I wrote earlier about how a couple of Robert E Howard books went missing. Well they've turned up. They were found in a box that had old equipment in and had nothing to do with books. A tattered copy of The Book of Robert E Howard, a very fine 1980s edition (still smelling newish) of She Devil and one I had forgotten about, The Howard Collector, a paperback collecting various bits and pieces from the legendary small press magazine put out by Glenn Lord in the early seventies. I've had a browse through them all, reading bits and pieces here and there.

The bad weather seems to have rode off into the distance (fingers crossed) with rain now taking its place. Luckily the house scrapped through the cold and snow but there were some tricky times. It has certainly been the worst winter I can recall - temperature wise at least.

The credit card is weighed down this month, due to Christmas spending, and I’ve avoided any sales (which are year round now anyway and don’t end when January ends) while off work. Boredom can set in easily when off work and getting into the car and off into town centres is an easy option. Waterstone’s have a sale on at the moment with a lot of good bargains but I decided not to splash any cash.

I’m hoping that post hasn’t been lost over the Christmas break: I’m expecting an important document and a little unsure of how long to wait before phoning up about it.

I've got a new bookshop to investigate: I noticed a car while parking which was advertising the bookshop (probably belonged to the owner) and on doing some Google-Fu found out they've been going for years - established 2005. It might be worth the extra five or ten minutes to get to; I'll find out next time I'm in Kirkcaldy. It should be worth a look at least.

Bluddy Freezing

Outside that is. I’m sitting in front of a nice hot coal fire. Third bad winter in a row here in the old yuckie but this one seems to be the worst because it is the coldest. A couple of times it has come close to frozen pipes but they haven’t as yet fingers crossed). The car regularly showed temperatures of minus six to minus eight. It’s supposed to be worse tonight, with temperatures going down to minus 14. There’s a wind here tonight which makes it that little bit colder.

The laptop is now starting to show signs of wear and tear. Two keys don’t work anymore. I don’t know when they stopped working but i noticed a week or so ago. The right shift button and the left arrow just underneath it don’t work anymore. But it doesn’t make the laptop unusable. I’m off work until the New Year so in theory I’ll be able to finish the posts I have that are three quarters done for the Bob Shaw blog and get some activity there again. but breath wont be held, particularly in this cold weather.

Afrur’s Here

Arfur who? Arfur Phuxzake! Dear or dear that was bad. I haven’t blogged in ages, just never had the inclination lately. I have more or less finished a couple of posts for the Bob Shaw blog but haven’t put those up either. Just in my lazy period I guess.

The snow has arrived early, and it hit us bad. We have at least 1 1/2 to 2 feet of snow. Today (Thursday) was the first time that I could use the car in anger. The roads have been pretty bad but the paths have been worse; un-walk able most of them, which meant walking on the roads most of the time. luckily there was little traffic. A lot of shops near here haven’t been getting deliveries, so milk bread and the like have been a bit thin on the ground, but stuff gets through eventually – except the papers one day last week. It has been bitterly cold and I’m dreading the heating bills which will arrive January/February time.

I ordered this by Philip Jose Farmer ages ago and it’s due to get sent out any day now, although with the weather supposedly getting bad in the UK next week again I might not get it until the New Year, if at all – an item from eBay hasn’t turned up yet.

I also treated myself to these from Robert E Howard. The prices are ok-ish for limited edition books but the postage was very steep.

I’m getting a little pissed of with Google Chrome. I have Firefox 2 on my USB stick but a lot of sites say it is unsupported now, and I get some trouble from some sites I visit using it. So I install Chrome, which is supposed to be slick and fast – it is neither. The amount of times I have seen ‘waiting for cache’ on the bottom left hand of the window. … It’s extremely slow. It seems to clog up memory and slow other programs too. If I was paranoid I’d say Google were piping traffic through their own servers to gather data. I wouldn’t put it past them but I suppose I shouldn’t be so suspicious either.

Oddities

There is a great viral video going round purporting to be a time traveller using a mobile phone back in 1928. The actual footage is only a few seconds long so kudos to the guy for getting an eight minute video out of it. (The action starts about two and a half minutes in for anyone wishing to skip the waffle.)

It’s highly unlikely it is a time traveller, highly unlikely they are using a mobile phone but it is fun, and a lot of idiots are proving themselves as idiots with comments on various websites, blogs and forums. Of course, the original film would put everything to rest as it would be much higher level of detail than a DVD rip and everything would be seen more clearly.

My theory is that Doc Savage and his crew were in town on a case. Doc and his crew had access to technology decades before the average person; Doc inventing most of it. Their adventures officially began in 1931 but they knew each other long before this, and no doubt were involved in lots of scrapes before the magazine hit the newsstands. This one involved Monk having to put on women’s clothing to avoid detection while he trailed someone, no doubt reporting back to Doc, Ham, Renny, Long Tom or Johnny via two way radio. Only Monk finds himself going past the premier of Charlie Chaplin’s new movie, The Circus, where a cameraman is filming.

I was involved in the great broadband drop at the weekend. I couldn’t access the world wide wobbly on Friday but all was restored on Saturday morning. BT’s Edinburgh data centre went puff and apparently this caused the central belt of Scotland, parts of Yorkshire and parts of Northern Ireland to be denied access to the internet.

Bought H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus 2 after reading a review of one of his stories. That particular story isn’t in the collection but it’s a reasonable collection: pretty much a three in one. There’s the main bulk of short stories, some early work and fragments and finally Lovecraft’s legendary non fiction piece about horror in literature, which is practically novel length in itself. I’ve read a couple of the stories before but got into a few and they’re ok, though not spectacular. The good thing is that a lot of the stories are short, six to ten pages. Good for dipping into regularly.

Second Hand Bookshops

I had occasion to visit Burntisland today. On eventually finding parking I noticed a bookshop right in front on me. It was a surprise as I didn’t think there were any more second hand book shops left in Fife (excluding St Andrews: that’s a university town – and posh) so as soon as my business was concluded I dove straight over for a gander.

They’re also online, but the picture on the web site doesn’t do it justice. For a start there were books outside, at the door and in front of one of the windows. And they weren’t nicked! Burntisland is your proverbial quaint old town; the roads are very narrow, not having been designed for cars, and the place could fit into the fifties no problem.

The book shop itself is stacked with all sorts – the website says they are strong on SF and Fantasy – and there was a section downstairs also.

I ended up spending £30 on ten books, including a paperback version of Bob Shaw’s The Two Timers. Some of the book prices were quite high – there was a basket with Robert E Howard books that interested me until I opened them up and saw the prices; up to £15 for some paperbacks – but there were also a lot of bargains too.

I got a few books from people I have never heard of: John Sylvester, Master of The World, hard back; Adam Roberts, Polystom, Hardback; John B Spencer, Quake City, Paperback, and some from liked authors: The Best of, Clifford D Simak, paperback, Two Timers, Bob Shaw, paperback, The White Dragon, Anne McCafferey, paperback. The last I’m sure I bought before as the cover looks very familiar.

I’m not sure how long I spend browsing but it must have been at least an hour, and well worth it too.

And I find

That my personal blog is down for some reason. It is on the same site as the Bosh Blog and that is fine, dandy and smiling at the world. Ho Hum. More bugs to splat I suppose.

Totally Cool

Been inactive with all blogs recently. Not had much time to blog lately, and not much time surfing the web either. But I did come across this via a post at Techdirt (from inside GoogleReader), and it is totally cool. More of this sort of thing should be encouraged.

I was shocked at last week’s ‘release’ of a campaign video by 10:10 called No Pressure. I say ‘release’ as it was withdrawn on the same day they told the world about it. They’ve lost all but one of their sponsors and are getting kicked by both sides for it. I wont link to it as it’s very graphic and probably upsetting, but it can be easily found on the web, youtube and other video sites. There’s all sorts of parodies flying around the web, including a couple of Hitler parodies. It really was a shot in the foot for the green movement.

Bluddy L 2: The Bloat

I had recovered a computer not used in years. Eventually I managed to get XP to repair it and it worked fine for a few days and I could access old programs, in particular Sophocles 2003. However there was a persistent and annoying software fault which no amount of searching online seemed to find a fix for. I have Sophocles 2007, and the registry settings to ensure I don't lose access to that program now the company has disappeared from the world, so the 2003 version is a little surplus to requirements. There wasn't anything else of worth on that computer so there was no reason not to do a full re install. So I took the plunge and just did a full clean reinstall of Windows XP. I took a back-up of the drivers first using Driver Genius Pro 2005 and copied a lot of other things to the portable USB drive before commencing on the clean re install.

It all went fine. Done in under an hour, activated and loading speedily. I restored the drivers, installed a couple of programs and then we went down the path of getting the OS up to date with patches and updates.

When I started Windows took up 2.6 Gig of the hard disk. When I finished all the updates (which again took the best part of six hours) the space used was up to 9.1 gigabytes.

Fair enough, this was a full update, skipping no patches or upgrades. A couple failed and I didn't update the graphics card driver (I did this first time round when the computer was 'repaired' and the graphics went haywire) but this is still a lot of hard disk space to relinquish.

Many megabytes of bandwidth and a threefold increase in space, and it's taking a lot longer to load up. Was it worth it? I ask myself.

Update, update, update

That’s all the new/old computer does. It’s currently working it’s way through 58 of them, and it did at least 30 on Friday. It has been idle for about three years so it does have a lot of catching up to do.

And I tracked the CD/DVD problem down to software – or to be more accurate the lack of software. It happens when I uninstall software. But as I uninstalled about four or five packages at the one time I can’t point an accurate finger at the culprit. And I’m not inclined to uninstall them one at a time to find out which one is causing the problem. I can live with a few programs that I hardly ever use sitting on my hard drive.

I haven’t been reading much of late – a little too busy with other things – but I’ll try and catch up; or at least complete the short story collections I’m working through. I found a great writer that has really impressed me. Rhys Hughes. He has a story in the Philip Jose Farmer collection The Worlds of Philip Jose Farmer and I bought one of his books on the strength of it. The Postmodern Mariner. It’s a collection of short stories and I have honestly enjoyed all that I have read so far. I can’t say that for every collection. Mostly I enjoy one or two, sometimes several, but there’s always a story that doesn’t quite hit it in every collection. But I haven’t come across it yet in The Postmodern Mariner.

I tried again to recover files from the U3 flash drive but no luck. I sent a couple of letters off by registered post last week and they weren’t in the back up before I lost/destroyed the USB drive. I have a print out of one but not the other. The program I used to hunt through the deleted files found all sorts, but not the files I was looking for. It found files from years ago but not a few days ago. And some of the dates on the files it did find were weird. 2135 and such.

I close this post with the old/new computer only on number 28 of the 58 updates.

One Up, One Down

I recently had some spare time and worked on an old desktop. It constantly rebooted and I didn't know if it was a hardware or a software problem. Trying to get Windows repaired didn't work, and other hard disks just caused it to not recognise any attached hardware. But I eventually managed to get it to offer me a repair option when I was using the original Windows disk after much gnashing of teeth working with other programs and fixes found on the Internet. This eventually led to a Windows repair which was basically a reinstall, with me entering the key and then online activation. The computer then booted up and within a few minutes I was looking at the contents of a hard drive that hadn’t been used since 2007. It is a pretty good spec computer too, even though it’s three or four years old.

I was quite pleased with myself.

Of course, the gods wouldn’t let it lie.

Today on my laptop my U3 disk wouldn’t load. Here we go I think, it's finally snuffed it. I had recently bought a four gigabyte one as a replacement because the one I have been using the past few years was giving some errors here and there and felt very fragile. The program wouldn’t load but the drive was still accessible. So I play around with that. I copy all the files to the c disk of the laptop and fiddle around with the U3 drive. No luck. It would not load any portable programs and the files downloaded from Sandisk wouldn't recognise the USB disk as a U3 drive.

I even tried programs from the temporary folder on the laptop hard disk but they wouldn’t work either. I reformat the drive and try to reinstall. No dice.

It’s about this time I realise it isn’t the fault of the U3 drive but the laptop. It is not recognising CD/DVD drives: not the internal one, not the external one and not the USB one. A quick check of the system shows me that it can’t find or load the drivers. Vista couldn’t find any drivers online or any solutions to the problem.

Ghost I think, it's saved my bacon before. And, without thought, I load the Ghost CD and restore the laptop to last week. It's halfway through when I realise that I hadn’t copied back the files for the U3 from the laptop c drive.

Norton Ghost does a ninety nine percent job of restoring the drive. I get a blue screen and then some Vista program called System Repair or something appears, spends ten minutes doing nothing and then loads the computer up. It's back to the way it was last Sunday, but seeing as I don’t keep any files on the laptop that's ok.

They’re all on the USB. Which has been re-formatted.

The recovery programs I tried were rubbish, listing only files with numbers. And there’s no way I’m going through four thousand files and renaming them. So I turn back to the backup disk and unzip the back up of the USB. I back that up manually using my copy of SecureZip. As it’s a manual backup by me it’s not as regular as the machine backup by Ghost. The latest I have is from late last month so I’ve lost about two weeks worth of information but it’s better than losing everything.

But I’ve got my old computer back again, and I might use that for a few things. Antics now has a workaround via the forum and I might stick Antics on the old computer - I did purchase the parts and build it to high specs so I could run Antics on it. And as I said earlier even though its three years old it’s still good specs: 2 gig of RAM, 2.4 gig processor, 250 gig hard drive, graphics card. That’s an OK spec even for now. It runs Windows XP which I still prefer over Vista and – as I made a point of never installing unnecessary software on that computer – it still loads and runs blindingly fast.

Another plus is that computer is where I have the program Sophocles. I bought it and then a few years later the company disappeared altogether. The software was Internet activated; you got a code from the guy and all the features were then enabled. And he was quite cool in that you could go back to him any number of times for another number. I only had two numbers; the one for the computer and another for the new (at that time) beta edition of the software.

When the software disappeared the Internet came to the rescue with a way to ‘activate’ on other computers, which involved saving out the registry entries. This allowed me to ensure that I can still use the software but only the beta version as I couldn’t access the original version on the old desktop computer. Now I can and I will save out the registry information so that if the computer goes down again at least I can continue to use that piece of software.