Time Grows Nigh.

Its finally starting to sink in that in just a few days I'll be inside a large metal bird flying over the ocean. Today I plan to do my packing so I have a couple days to possibly remember things I forgot to pack. Tomorrow I'll have to head into town to drop off my library books and buy some American and Danish money. Tuesday I'll get up early enough to give the house a quick tidying up, and then I'll head off to the airport where the adventure begins in earnest.

Namenclature.

Its difficult talking about folks when everyone has the same first name. I once worked in a company with three guys named Mike in the same small department. They ended up being called Mike A, Mike B, and Mike C, since their last initials were A, B and C. I don't even remember who Mike A was, but I'm still friends with Mike B and run into Mike C on rare occasions.

In a similar vein, I currently know 4 folks with the first name of 'Peter' or some varient. Luckily (?) two are french, one is english and one is spanish, so a first cut can reduce them to 2 Pierres, one Peter and one Pedro. But what about the Pierres? (Okay, its true that cpirate is also a Peter, but I don't know any funny stories about him.)

Lately I've often had to stop and point out that when I am telling a funny story about Pierre, it either IS, or ISN'T pphaneuf. Obviously, a naming convention is needed. At first, it was proposed that I refer to them as 'Pants-On Pierre" and "Pants-Off Pierre", which would seem to be a distinguishing characteristic. I have seen both without pants, but only one of them has graced the main page of a website dedicated to pantslessness.

The trouble, of course, is that these are cumbersome phrases and in both cases the initals are P.O.P. An alternative then would be to use the P+P for Pants-On Pierre and P-P for Pants-Off Pierre. Of course, then one is tempted to do the math and end up with 2P and 0 as the identifiers, which don't seem to work as well.

Then again, a bit more math gives us P^log_p2 and P^-∞ which may or may not be better...

Mostly Packed.

I've packed most of my stuff now. All I have left is to divvy up the toiletries between my carry-on bag and my main suitcase. Of course, the last of the packing will have to wait until Tuesday morning, since I'm still using some of my toiletries, but that should be a minor matter.

Dang, its really starting to feel like I'll be flying away in two days.

WTF?

Another Windows XP mystery:

The backup of my hard drive just failed with a 'Not enough space' error, despite the fact that I am backing up from one drive to an identical drive and there is over 25 gig free on the source drive.

After deleting everything on the destination (ie, one humongous backup file), I noticed there was only about 2/3 of the amount of space there should be. All disk tests checked out normal. The trash can is empty. I don't have any sort of indexing on (and how much indexing does 1 file need anyway?).

In the end I reformatted my backup drive and suddenly it was correctly reporting the amount of space. I wonder what on earth happened?

Anyway, I'll let the backup run all night and hopefully it will complete successfully this time.

In Other News.

I installed a wiki on my server today. I haven't finished configuring it, so it isn't visible to anyone but me yet, but it does exist. I don't know if I'll manage to get it configured tomorrow night or not. Tomorrow during the day I won't get the chance.