Week of  8th November, 1999

Last Week

Monday, 8th November

First day of digital transmission, starting at about 4 am local time. I shall be asleep, unless I get the 'phone call - "HE-E-E-E-L-L-L-L-P!".

Later: Well, no 'phone call. When I went in for an overtime shift at midday, all seemed to be well. There were occasional problems as the day went by, but it's all a learning experience - we'd have known about most of them if we had had some shadowing time. But of course, my late employers were convinced that "digits are perfect, and will not need practice", and enforced that belief with severe monetary penalties in the contracts.

Still, the rush seems to have died down - instead of emulating blue-a***d flies, we now have time for coffee breaks and reflection - not too much of the latter, mind you.

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Tuesday, 9th November

Went Christmas present shopping today, all linked to the current craze for "Pokemon". We've got the Nintendo Gameboy games (two of them, one for Jenny and one for her cousin, Luke). Now to get the Gameboy itself, and the link cable. The Gameboy was easy, the link cable was almost as rare as hen's teeth.

We also checked out the "pay-as-you-go" mobile 'phone offers for Sarah, who has expressed a wish for such a thing. Mind you, she's paying for it. I can't afford three mobile phone bills.

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Wednesday, 10th November

More paperwork arrived today from Action, about the new HD for Fujisan. I've got the discount, but to do it, Action had to credit me the full (erroneous) amount, and then rebill the correct (discounted) price. This seems excessive, but never mind, it's sorted. Now to install it. The weekend seems like a good time.

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Thursday, 11th November

Remembrance Day. This is the day when we commemorate the dead of two World Wars.

"At the 11th Hour, of the 11th Day, of the 11th Month, we will remember them"

The date and time is taken from the signing of the Armistice at the end of the First World War, in 1918. At this time, we wear artificial poppies, symbolic of the Flanders poppy fields, and observe two minutes silence, in memory of those who died. There are also public remembrance services, which tend to be held on the second Sunday in November, that is this coming Sunday.

Having read the other "Daynoters" posts on this matter, maybe I'd better describe my family connections with the war. Obviously, I'm too young to have any first-hand experience of WW2, and by the time I reached the appropriate age, conscription had been abolished, so I have no military experience.

My father worked in the steel industry during WW2. This was a reserved occupation, so he was not conscripted. From comments he made, in passing, I believe that he worked on the PLUTO (Pipe Line Under The Ocean) project, which was a way of getting petrol (gasoline) across the English Channel for the use of Allied troops after Normandy (and to attempt to counteract Hollywood propaganda that the Americans won the war alone, we British were there too. In fact there was a school of thought at the time that said the "Yanks" were always late for a war).

My mother was a nurse in London during the Blitz, and both of them had stories to tell about bombing raids by the Germans.

Jane's father worked for Napier, the aero-engine manufacturer, and as such was also in a reserved occupation. Jane's mother, although she wasn't allowed to talk about it until recently, worked at Bletchley Park, where the German codes were routinely broken. This was a saga in itself, and one I may return to at a later time.

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Friday, 12th November

More problems with Jane's mother's car. The battery discharges routinely, over a period of a couple of days - cause unknown. So, after jumpstarting the beast, I drove down to the garage, where they will attempt to isolate the phantom drain. I doubt the problem is the battery, since that's brand new.

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Saturday, 13th November

It's "upgrade Fujisan day" today. I started at about 11am, with a full backup to tape (Iomega Ditto 2GB) and compare. This ate about the next two an a half hours, for about 575 MB of data. The compare picked up 15 errors and corrected them, which isn't bad for about 19,500 blocks of data.

Then I removed the access cover and took out the old drive. I was surprised by how warm it was. After installing the new drive, which was surprisingly easy, I switched on, and went into the BIOS setup. Fujisan recognised the drive immediately on being asked to do so, and reported 6,495MB of space. Great - quit out of BIOS setup, and reboot with the startup disk I had previously prepared (shades of the childrens' TV show "Blue Peter"!). Partition and format the drive as one partition, FAT32, for 6.194GB of useable space, in 4kB allocation units. I had a stupid grin on my face all through this process - I won't need to worry about space for a very long time. That ate another half hour.

Then it was time to restore my drive image. I invoked the restore program off the Iomega Emergency Recovery disk I had also made earlier and waited. About three hours later, after the drive had shoe-shined its way through the backup set, I was done. The restore utility is very slow compared to the Windows version, which surprised me at the time, although in hindsight, since DOS doesn't timeshare any too well, perhaps this is not too unlikely.

After a final reboot, all was back to normal, barring the free space, of course. And, I later discovered, the inability of the Phoenix (BIOS manufacturer)- supplied utility PHDISK to create a suspend to disk file - something about "BPB not recognised". I sense a call to Fujitsu Tech Support.

While the restore was running, Sarah prevailed upon me to take her to the shops to consider mobile 'phones. She finally settled on the 'phone she wants, but guess what? None in stock - call on Monday afternoon to see if any have arrived. If so, one will have her name on it.

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Sunday, 14th November

The Emergency Restore routine left a line in AUTOEXEC.BAT that calls PHDISK on boot-up. I put a REM in front of it, and then remembered that there are several real-mode drivers being started, the CD-ROM and sound chip, to name but two. So I experimented, commenting out real-mode driver after driver, until none were left. Everything seemed to work, so I renamed the files to *.OLD.

After all this, Fujisan seems subjectively quicker. He certainly boots faster - whether this is the new hard disk, effectively a full defrag due to the backup and restore, and/or the removal of realmode drivers, I don't know. I also can't quantify the speedup, if speedup there be. But it works, and there's acres of free space.

Harking back to previous problems, the Xircom card is much more stable, despite occasional lockups, than the combination of Olicom Ethernet card and Auslinx Kookaburra modem. The modem, in particular, is much more reliable - line drops seem to be a thing of the past. The travails I've had over this seem to have been worthwhile - Fujisan is faster, more stable, and does his work well.

Celery is also running well, barring the problem with the CD-Writer, which is next on the agenda to fix.

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