For Bottom Feeders (and others of course)

Some people may be interested to not that there is an for what yu want to do with it. Although repeatedly downloading it may great on me eventually…..

Some quick sucesses on a mixed Saturday

I suddenly found myslef climbing in Wales this weekend. Helpfully some other memebers of PMC gave me a lift. Saturday morning I found myself on Holyhead Mountain via a gear shop to buy guidebooks, climbing with a chap called Malcolm.

I lead the first lead, on a severe (Stairs), although i let Malcolm lead through on the 2nd pitch, which i suspected was where the grade came from… I then led a single pitch severe (Teenage Kicks). So there it was. My first lead at "Severe".

Malcolm then led something, and I am surprised I cannto rememebr what it was. I thought it would be a single pitch VS. But i cannot put my finger on it, actually there might have been a couple, and they may have been multipitch. Hmmmm

At this point I found my self celebrating my earlier first, by leading my first "VS" (Teaser) whihc i now have a number of scrapes to show for the handjams. Much friend placement….

Malcolm then led "Plesant Surprise" before I lead "New boots and Panties&quot as soemthing to finsih off on. We both climbed carying walking shoes on our harnesses for that last one, having done quite enough walk downs in rock shoes, thankyou….

My rockshoes are now showing signs of wear. At the same time, i would find some more, larger, friends of use on my rack….

OH, and in the evening, I trevered the Hut table.

Gmail Accounts…

Anyone want a Gmail invite? I seem to have some more….

The king is dead. Ling live the king!

Today I stopped recieving email originating from edward dot brown at ic dot ac dot uk. Thanks to Mr Langley edward dot brown at gmail dot com has been born. Wow.

In the next few weeks, I guess I will find out if it really lives up to the hype. All these new concepts…. still I have redirected my "normal" email, so copies go to my Gmail account too.

If you are lucky I might get around to sharing my thoughts on it.

Backup and then Install

I was rather lazy the other day, and paid for it with all my data….

For over a year now, I have had 2 harddisks in my Packard Bell PC. One, the origonal 10Gb disk, carried operating system, and some very minor data, the other, a 120Gb disk, carried program files for my current XP installation, and 99% of my data.

I had decided to install Mandrake 10 Official Edition, insted of an old XP installation, and unneeded data partitions on the 10Gb disk. It kept having problems when it came to installing the boot loader. However, it didnt ruin windows, as had been reported elsewhere.

I got clever, and decided to install Mandrake 9.2, which was running fine on my Compaq box. The installation ran through fine, it even booted up (which is where Mandrake 10 had failed) I had the bootloader on floppy disk, and here is where I am not sure what I did, as I had both a bootloader on floppy disk, and had ruined the ability for windows to boot.

Having seen all the instructions, I used the rescue disks to repair windows. this didnt work. And then, whilst in Mandrake I made a chilling discovery…. Something had killed my 120Gb data disk, with a file of just a few Kb. Evidently something had not been able to tell the difference between C: and any other place…

Eventually I managed to get an XP installation going. It whinges about disk space, but it runs. I moved the swap file to the 4Gb partition that had been XP before, (for some reason it decided the best place for that was on the 120Gb disk) and have now installed RecoverMyFiles and hope to get the data back, but I lose the file names… so It may take a while to sort out. This does mean I have not watched 24 in a few days, and now have *a lot* of CD burning to do, so as to save all the data again….

The moral is, and I should know better, that I should back my data up. Its not like the CDs are very expensive. I had relied on the idea of one disk for OS and one for data. The alternative is I should have unplugged the harddrive untill I had a fully working system again. A lesson should be learned from all of this….