Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

As always these things take a while to get set up - not least because of all the applications that have to be reinstalled.

But now I have a PC with a 2.6Mb dual core processor, 2Gigs of RAM, Disc space totalling 1,352 Gigs of space across three physical disks. The video card has more memory than my old PC. It moves faster than shit off a shovel.

All I need to do now is work out how to get it to recognise the nice clean wireless keyboard, so I can use this tatty, grubby old thing as a reserve fall back.

For oncer, tech is my friend!

With any luck, this will be the last post I make from this machine.

My friend, Glyn, who has done so much to keep this brute up and running across the years, has built me a new one from scratch and having tested it, is expected about 3pm this afternoon, for delivery and install. I daresay that there will be some fun to be had shifting applications around and all, but this will be the first new build from scratch that I have had in a computer for close on ten years.

This machine, Frankenstein, as I like to call it, has been upgraded bit by bit in that time, so that I think the floppy drive is all that is left of the original. Since I cannot remember when I actually used a floppy disk last, I shall be waving a tearful farewell to it when the new machine arrives.

A little of Frankenstein will live on, however. The 200Gig Hard Drive I installed a couple of years ago will be shipped to the new machine to complement the 500Gig drive in the new machine. What with the 750 Gig Seagate external drive I also have, I anticipate that it will take hours for my storage space to get used up.

One arrived back at the Athenaeum Club after a hard day's running the country, to find the inestimable colonel_maxim in something of a lather.

It seems that someone from his friends' list had gone one better than the steampunk keyboard. Sadly, one does not have access to that journal, but rarely does Google let one down in times of extremis. I therefore present the steampunk computer



And as it says on the chap's site, ( the obligatory sepia shot )

Sometimes the nark factor of technology just tip toes along the edge of making you want to give up on it all and just go out and smack an Aurochs over the head with a bone mallet. Sadly all round, this is no longer an option; thousands of generations ago cave men infuriated by the nark factor of say, wheel, knobkerrie or fire technology, wandered out into the wilderness one time too many and the lowly Aurochs is no longer with us.

Tonight when I got in from work, and before the evening's gaming began, I fancied listening to some loud music at point blank range. That is to say, sitting about 18" in front of the speakers. I have listened to too much on the headphones recently, using my Walkman, and frankly, good as it is, it just ain't the same. I could have plugged the Walkman into the hi-fi, or played a CD, but the sound system is in the bedroom, and I wanted to get the full-on experience whole browsing the web and reading my emails. So it had to be music from the computer.

Well this is all well and good; most of my CD collection has found its way onto my Walkman via the computer, so by and large there's a fair old selection of music tucked away on my Hard Drive. Great chunks of it,however, are not where they're supposed to be. As with most applications, the ATRAC software I use insisted upon installing itself on the C Drive, and opening the library there. I didn't notice until I started running out of space, and this is particularly silly since I have over 200Gigs of free space littered around my PC, so a little attention would have ensured that the population of the C drive didn't equate to the byte version of downtown Dacca. Some months ago I moved the library to a different partition on a different disk. All well and good, but I seem to have transferred a lot of song titles but not the accompanying files. Quite where they ended up, God only knows, and He's not telling. Several searches have proved fruitless. They must be here somewhere, but have gone into hiding.

Swine.

So when I decided to listen to a couple of tracks by Sandy Denny and the Strawbs from the All Our Own Work Album I was annoyed to find that they hadn't made the transition and were on the run somewhere in my computer. "Never mind" thought I, "I'll copy them back off the Walkman".

Ho Yus.

Five minutes later, the tracks had disappeared from the Walkman and gone into anonymous exile somewhere on the PC; I still have no idea where they are. In the end, I got the CD off the rack and re-copied it to both. Then I played a couple of the best tracks VERY LOUD.

I wish I knew where all that music ended up, though...

Excuse me while I bang my head on the table in frustration.

Ten days ago I bought myself a dongle (that word still makes me laugh) precisely so I can write documents at work or at home and then transfer them from one place to the other - or rather, keep them with me so I can fiddle with them when I get near a computer that's elsewhere.

I keep forgetting. This means that I keep emailing the buggers back and forth, and that means that sometimes they get lost. Like tonight, for instance. Before I left the office I emailed myself a bit of NWO stuff to play with back here. I hasn't arrived yet. It's sitting somewhere on a server in transit. It may arrive in ten seconds, ten minutes, ten days, ten years or never.

I have an earlier version on my home PC, but do not feel inclined to try and recreate what I typed in my lunchtime today when I know it's on the computer in the office.

MUST REMEMBER TO PUT DONGLE IN POCKET (Fnar).

You can tell I haven’t had a great deal of experience with bit torrents, and burning videos to disk. I like to think, though, that I’m a fast learner. Well, fast insofar as I might not know what to do, but I quickly pick up on what not to do.

Over the weekend as reported previously, I downloaded the most recent episodes of Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and Battlestar Galactica. So far so good. Now I haven’t watched these yet; I want to drop them onto CDs because I have friends who would like to watch them, and I’d like to see them on TV rather than my PC simply because I know how to fix the brightness and contrast on TV (I have a theory that on my PC it will involve downloading some media player upgrade that will cost money, and I don’t feel like doing that, thank you very much).

Anyway, last night, I started the transcoding and burning process. My PC, courtesy NERO, cheerfully reported that the target disk had enough space for two 45 minute episodes in VCD format, so I thought I’d stick SG-1 ep 3 and Atlantis ep 3 on the same disk. No problem, and convenient, to boot. The transcoding took about an hour and a half, and then NERO reports that the target disk is too small.

There is a marginal rise in blood pressure.

Undaunted, I abandon that job (NERO Likes to call them jobs, see), and set it up to transcode a single episode as an SVCD. Plenty of room on the disk for that, but the slow burning technique adopted by my PC now slides back to crock pot speed, and at 1% every three – four minutes, I decide to let the bugger do it overnight.

This morning, I awake to find the procedure has aborted; I can’t remember the problem, but there was a deal of swearing involved, and a further rise in blood pressure.

Third time lucky. One episode, one disk, transcode to VCD format. Forty minutes start to finish. Done. Why didn’t I just do that in the first place?

Mind you, apart from writing the episode number on the disk, and putting it a case, I haven’t watched it yet. What odds it still doesn’t work, and I’ve wasted a CD ROM?

Pah.

All things considered I managed a reasonable night’s sleep in the end. Once the Kronenbourg 1664 had gone down, I wandered off to bed absolutely knackered, but still unaccountably bursting with adrenaline. I have no idea why I should get an adrenaline rush just before bed. My life isn’t exciting enough to warrant it. Nonetheless, there it was. It took a while to doze off, but I did in the end, and slept the sleep of the dead.

Just as well, as today, being my last day in the office for a week has been hectic. I have been as busy as a …er… busy thing, and I’m not entirely sure that I’ve managed to get rid of everything I should have. Not that I care, particularly. I can do it when I come back.

Well, yesterday we completed the ISP migration from entanet to Plus Net , a switch that would have been a little more complicated had not Ser Taylor been at hand, as I had no idea where the url was for the router, so couldn’t change the settings to point it at the new server. Ironically, on the day the migration took place, we received a new bill from entanet, still in Adam’s name despite the fact he moved out 3½ months ago, and with no hint of the fact that they had already migrated us. I wouldn’t want to be in their accounts department if they try to take the money from Adam’s bank account through direct debit. He should, of course, have cancelled, but I’m not sure he has…

Anyway, we’re still at 512k for the next week potentially, but once BT get their act together and do what ever magic they do at the exchange, we will be up to 2mb, which increases the urgency for a 200gig hard drive on my PC so I can download all that nice telly and stuff on the bit torrents. Luckily the brutes are relatively cheap these days. I’m just going to have to remember where the various applications are, and how they are spread across the drives I already have. That might be fun.

Two hundred gigabytes.

Ten years ago I was fretting over a 100meg hard drive. Cripes.