I'm bored...

... or desperate.

Waiting for Disk Copy to finish "cloning" the drive on my new desktop so I can try fixing the mess I made yesterday without making things worse.It's been running for 11 hours and has 4 to go (I picked the overly paranoid options, such as "verify drive", and "read after write").

So, I'm watching my copy of <shudder> The Star Wars Holiday Special

This and that

Well, I think I've undone the damage I did to the system last night.

In other news, I really do need a keeper some days. My back has been hurting when I move wrong for a couple of days and it only just dawned on me that it might help to take some acetaminophen... Duh.

Now if I can get Trillian working "right", everything will be fine on the new system

More technical "fun"

Busily installing drivers and software on new machine.

Lost sound for a bit when I tried the "upgrade" Windows update offered for the sound hardware drivers. All it did was nuke the old one. Yeesh.

But most of the stuff is going well. Turns out that the free CD burning software that came with the DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive is the "basic" version of a program I bought a few years back. So I'm upgrading that.

Meanwhile, the DVD player software wanted to run some tests on a copy protected DVD. So I grabbed my Monty Python and the Holy Grail - Collector's Edition. I bought it just before Thanksgiving, and when I'd opened it I'd found that the "fancy" box holding the DVDs and stuff had been poorly assembled. The glue holding the "cover" to the "box" hadn't bonded well (and in fact had been applied in the wrong spots).

Okay, I could live with that, and since Lin & Kermit didn't want to watch it, I'd just put it away until I got back home. And hadn't felt like watching it. But since it was on the top of the stack I grabbed it....

...and I then discovered that the way the DVDs were "held" in position was such that I can't see any way to get them *out* without either mutilating the case or risking *breaking* them!!!!!

Guess I'm going to take them back and give CostCo a piece of my mind. Unless they can prove to me that a replacement copy *isn't* messed up the same way (and the bit with the way the DVDs are held seems to be the way the case is *designed*) I'll be getting a refund, not a replacement.

This is *very* annoying. And I don't need the aggravation today. Really.

Merry Christmas Programmers!

(from a mailing list I'm on)

Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2005 00:30:39 -0800
From: Uilliam mac Ailéne mhic Seamuis <uilliam@shaw.ca>
To: steps@antir.sca.org
Subject: [STEPS] OOP OT Night Before Christmas in pseudo-code (was: Re: [STEPS] Navy version of "Twas the Night Before Christmas)

I figured I'd have a go at a Night Before Christmas parody. This is for the code-bashers in the crowd.

/* Night Before Christmas
*
* rev 0.1
* status: in development
*/

#include

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