The BigLig Thinks

So, I switch it to hda5, boot, and still can't mount hda7 – it reports this is swap.

Oh dear, I think. Or words to that effect.

So, reboot to Windows, and thank goodness, it can see Data2, and so I copy files to Data1 (just room for them) and blow data2 away – it can be my new /home if I can figure out how to do this.
Reboot, and grub error 17. It's this sort of thing that causes unrest.
I remain calm, barely, and boot from a knoppix CD – or rather I would, if I could find it. Failing that, I boot from an ancient linux live CD I can find.
Right, off to read up on grub. Manual is unintelligible; this page slightly less so.
My notes go bad at this point, sorry. I think it was fear.
Anyhow, from grub on the boot CD I use the find command to work out that Linux is on (hd0,2) in GRUB-speak, which is hda3 in fstab speak.
setup (hd0) gets grub in the MBR reset so that on booting I get a grub menu. Huzzah, I can boot to Windows from this, but not to Linux.
I can study the entry in the boot menu from this and see that the partitions are wrong – it's looking at (hd0,3). Has Windows reordered the partitons? How odd, since I deleted the last one... shouldn't have thought it would touch any earlier ones.
Hit the buttons to edit the menu item and decrease all the numbers by one and it boots into Linux. So edit the menu.lst in /boot/grub to make this permanent, cross my fingers, and reboot.

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Dapper Drake is sounding good, and imminent, so I thought I'd put Ubuntu on my production machine again, so I can get some learning space in before it comes out.
OK, rearranging my PC in preparation for Dapper Drake.
I already have most of my data on a separate (NTFS) partition, so that is OK (after a few minutes checking for anything I've missed. This partition also has all the XP drivers for my machine. I move all my music over the network to my second machine, since I don't really have the room on my data partitions.
The partioning plan is three steps:
Before:

• 55Mb Dell System FAT16
• 30Gb Windows NTFS
• 15Gb Data 1 NTFS
• 10Gb Data 2 NTFS

• 55Mb Dell System FAT16
• 10Gb Windows FAT32 (So I can write to it)
• 20Gb Linux / EXT3
• 1Gb Swap Swap
• 15Gb Data 1 NTFS
• 10Gb Data 2 NTFS

• 55Mb Dell System FAT16
• 10Gb Windows FAT32
• 20Gb Linux / EXT3
• 1Gb Swap Swap
• 15Gb Linux /Home ReiserFS or whatever

• 55Mb Dell System FAT16 /dev/hda1
• 10Gb Windows FAT32 /dev/hda2
• 20Gb Linux / EXT3 /dev/hda4

• 1Gb Swap Swap /dev/hda5
• 15Gb Data 1 NTFS /dev/hda6
• 10Gb Data 2 NTFS /dev/hda7

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Been a while since I posted one of these...
Train, by Sonya Kitchell, is a lovely jazz song, with an edge to the lyrics, that makes it more than another Nora Jones clone. I must find more of her stuff.
Oh, and I'm dabling with using the theme tune to The IT Crowd as my mobile ring tone, so if you see me in the street, wrestle me to the ground and shout "No!".
Interesting, my experience of The IT Crowd, when it was trailed on Channel Four I thought that it wouldn't be for me for some reason (although I enjoy the work of everyone involved tha tI've heard of) so I didn't watch it. Then Cory Doctorow raved about it, so I decided I would give it a look. (Downloading from Bitorrent is legal if you're just timeshifting, isn't it?)
I've enjoyed it immensely, so Cory gets some Whuffie for that. If you ever find a commentator on the internet whose taste you agree with, hold onto them desperately.
Hell, even if you only slightly agree with them. I find that about 98% of the music Warren Ellis recommends I hate, but the other 2% is some of the best stuff I have ever heard. And when it's free on the internet then you don't mind that so much.
When it comes to buying a full CD though... I remeber hearing a track from Cindy Lee Berryhill's "Naked Movie Star" on the radio that I loved; bought the album; hated every other track. A gamble; but then again I've had such success with my "now and again buy a really cheap album you never heard of, on the basis of the cover" has worked tremendously well for me.

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Something that started as an idle amusement but has now come to be a fascinating diversion. I have installed the Google Pack Screensaver - which basically you point at a folder, and it displays the images in that folder as if they were polaroids thrown on a table. There are lots of these sorts of screen savers about.
Well, I decided that I would point it at a folder which I would then populate with things that I like. Google Image search can produce a picture of anything you can think of, so the source is easy - it's thinking of all the things I love and like that is the fun.
So far, to my amazement, I have 258 images in my folder... my secret of life is revealed, I'm having a fabulous time.
It really is a fabulous exercise, and doubtless some day when I'm bored with it I can start a folder of things I hate.

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A week of hell and exhaustion is keeping me from updating in here, apologies.
I'm not doing great with the diet, but not doing awful either. I'm eating less crap, and usually choosing a healthier option when I see a choice. Yesterday, for example, after 6 hours sleep (interrupted by an hour in the middle, and a 13 hour work day, I had a fry, for example, but it wasn't as bad as usual - toasted sodas with low fat spread, 3 organic sausages and 2 free range eggs, fried in a little olive oil.

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I've got to keep up, else I'll forget! In fact I am forgetting!
Saturday:
A fillet of mackerel with 2 pieces of dry brown toast
A small cheese pizza.
And also far too much booze. A 33cl bottle of Sam Adnams beer at lunch. (To be fair, I usually have two bottles). A pint of cider. (Best beloved's fault for sending me out for fags!). Half a bottle of red wine. (To befair, usually it's a whole bottle. That sounds just as bad as it is.)


Sunday:
A fillet of mackerel with 2 pieces of dry brown toast (again! In fact, more than again, as it repeated on my all day) with 330ml of beer.
Quorn mince with Tesco spicy bean salad as a sort of instant artificial low fat chilli, with a baked spud. Very nice actually, once Best Beloved had spiced the bean salad up to something you can taste.
Half a bottle of red wine.

Also lots of cups of 1 calorie hot chocolate - Waitrose had a special offer on sachets of different flavours. White chocolate was horrible; cinnamon was interesting.

Found my self obsessively reading this and thinking about food. Not a good sign. (That site is full of strange stuff, BTW)

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A litre of water this time, plus coffee and tea.
2 pieces diet cheese on brown toast ( i.e. cottage cheese on toast. It tastes surprisingly like proper cheese on toast, and is a useful psychological boost. I wonder if I add Worcester Sauce, will it taste like welsh raerbit?)
1 weetabix with hot milk. Yes, one. I'm serious!
A portion of turkey, fried in a little olive oil and served in a sandwich. Quite nice, although I slightly overdid the bread by careless sandwich making.
Probably about 500ml of red wine. I don't know, I have 500ml in the house, and it's Friday, so I reckon I can push the boat out.

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...to weigh myself last night. This morning I'm 116kg. Not too much to be read into that, there's too much fluctuation in your weight on any given day to make any individual figure meaningful - you've got to average it over a long period to see if the trend is up or down.

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Another glug of chocolate milk
A bowl of museli
A mug of Miso soup
Less water
More tea
2 scrambled eggs
4 slices of dry brown toast
330ml beer
200ml red wine

I can't tell if this is worse than before... the beer and the second two slices of toast were down to a willpower failure, but when I spilt 50ml of the 250ml serving of wine I didn't go get more, so that's a good sign. Also there were free cookies and chocolate in work and I avoided both.

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BTW, I just tried Kubuntu, which is basically Ubuntu but using KDE instead of Gnome. It certainly looked very nice - must be something in the font smoothing or such - although it seemed to come with a lot less stuff set-up than plain ubuntu does - for example it hadn't mounted my Windows partition. So, not something to keep, although it would be interesting to investigate why it looks so much nicer.
I'm considering putting Ubuntu back on my spare 25Gb chunk of disk - is it worth it? My disk is getting a little tight with that 25Gb removed, although to be fair I have 8Gb or so of TV shows copied from my PVR that I won't need to keep around once I've watched them all.

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At about 4pm today, with no lunch, and a head ringing with the complexities of reprogramming PBXs, I felt a great urge for a McDonalds Quarter Pounder with cheese. But no! Instead, today started a month of weight loss and general detoxification.
I have eaten today:
About a liter of water
Big glug of chocolate milk (a healthy breakfast)
Tesco diet tuna and sweetcorn sandwich
portion of turkey, potion of pasta, a serving of Tesco diet pasta sauce, and a tin of sweetcorn.
1/4 bottle of red wine
Packet of peanuts.
About 4 cups of black coffee (no sugar)

Now, this is of course not very good, especially the peanut guzzling. But, much better than what I usually eat/drink. Not much exercise in there, something else to address.
Tonight I weigh a terrible 120kg. Let's see what that is like in April.

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