Retro-Futurism!

We now present for your edification, a video of 1999's home computer technology, made in 1967!

Owie!

Woke up with a migraine today. Took some AC&C and a large strong coffee (which I need to refill -- Okay, did that.) and its blunted it, but its far from gone.

As usual, when I woke up I wasn't even sure it was a migraine. As I stumbled downstairs I was trying to figure out if the throbbing in my temples was a budding migraine, a sinus reaction to too-dry air, or the aftermath of the 4 glasses of wine I had last night.

However, taxlady took one look at me and said "It looks like you're having a migraine" and went and made me a strong coffee while I went back upstairs and found my meds. Sure enough, by the time the coffee was ready a couple of minutes later, there was no doubt.

Luckily, all I had planned to do this morning is start up a data copy of 200 GB from one drive to another, and watch it progress. Even in my current state, that's not too hard to do.

BTW: Firefox dictionary additions: where are they stored. Now that I've gone and installed Firefox afresh on my new system, it doesn't have any of my additions to its completely inadequate dictionaries. Does anyone know how to copy them from my old install, or should I just google for it? (See, it doesn't know about 'Google' as a verb...)

System Rebuild Progress.

Well, yesterday I spent finding and installing new drivers and system patches and such. I haven't finished that yet -- I've yet to install my modem driver and I haven't gone to the ASUS website to find out if there is a newer version of my BIOS or updated system drivers I should be using (Their automated utility claims not, but its Engrish is so bad it may, in fact, be trying to tell me something else so I need to double-check).

Today will, no-doubt, be spent finding and installing the latest versions of the various bits of free software that I use. In at least one case (Xemacs) that is going to be rather involved since I've been using a pre-release version that needs to be compiled from scratch (because I insist on Unicode support, and its broken in the latest public release for Windows, but fixed in the CVS).

I'm sure I've got a ton of other things on my to-do list to get this system back to where I want it, but right now the lingering effects of that migraine are making it difficult to remember them all.

Ah well, I always figure it takes me 3-4 days to configure a Windows system to my liking, and today is only day 2. (It takes me much longer for a Linux system, BTW, partly due to unfamiliarity, and partly because I keep finding things I expect to be able to configure -- but can't.)

'It's a question of speed, son.'

100 points to anyone who can identify the movie that quote is from.

I've just finished writing 200 GB of data from my new 500GB SATA drive to my new 500GB PATA backup drive. It took about 2 hours. Yesterday copying that same data off of an 'old' 200GB PATA drive onto the SATA took 5 hours. So, the new backup drive can WRITE over twice as fast as my old system drive can READ. Color me impressed!

(Yes, okay, my old drive is horribly fragmented and the new one was completely empty, but still!)

A Day of Stuff.

So today I spent mucho time installing and configuring software. I still have a ways to go, but things are beginning to look like my old system. I'm still doing lots of infinite recursion as I work though. For instance, I went to download a utility, and found out it was available as a torrent. So, I first went to install uTorrent. Well, it wanted to know what the port number was in my firewall that it should use. I didn't remember. So, I had to ssh to my firewall. Only, I first had to find and install PuTTY so that I could use SSH.

That sort of thing has happened time and time again today. I currently have a stack of *counts* 20 CDs sitting beside my computer that contain software or data that I want to restore. Now, in some cases its just one tiny driver off a whole CD, but other times (like with Wordperfect) its all of the contents of multiple CDs.

Right now, as I type this, the last of the various PATA hard drives I've been using have been copied to my new SATA drive, and I'm now in the process of copying them all at once onto my backup SATA. After that I will feel secure in deleting and rearranging files as I go, knowing that I have copies both on the original drives and on my new backup.

So, my day has not gone too badly at all so far, even if it started with a migraine. How has yours gone?