It'll Never Fly

I’ve been having some poor performance from one of the hard drives
in my server at home. I just though it needed some defragging.
Looks like the drive itself has detected a fault of some kind. I’ve
know that since Panther, defragging isn’t really necessary due to (I
think) the way HFS+ works or the Unix-like under-pinnings of OS X.
However, I think that only applies to the boot drive, and only to
files that are 20MB or smaller. My drive had lots of large files
that were all 100MB or more, and the drive got quite full at one
point (less than 50MBs free on a 40GB drive). Needless to say,
that’s probably what caused it. Luckily, the files have all been
moved off long ago, and it’ll be easy to replace. I guess Ragnarok
was not the best of names to use, eh?

Of course, when it rains, it pours. My mom’s computer likely has the
same problem. Hers is making strange sounds, so it’s likely to fail
very, very soon. I should have a drive arriving at work tomorrow to
backup her files later that evening. Hopefully, it will go smoothly.

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

I gots me a new DVD player. A Polaroid PDV-0700K Portable DVD Player. I even found a way to make it region-free, using a built-in function on the player itself. I’m not going to tell you how, but I will say the number 1379 is important (I’m slightly surprised they didn’t use the number 1337; it means “elite” in hacker terminology). I might have a reason to go to the cottage more often now. My Dad finally received an iPod of his own (40GB version), so in much the same manner as the A&W Burger family, we are the Apple iPod family.

My brother and I gave each other board games. Risk: Lord of the Rings Trilogy for me, and HeroScape for him.

And as a late Christmas present, I bought myself a Kodak EasyShare DX7590 at BestBuy.ca for $570 CAD. Needless to say, I’m not going bargain hunting on Boxing Day today, as I think I found one yesterday.

More to come, time permitting.

In accordance with German tradition, in a few short hours I’ll be sitting in the living room with family and friends and opening my Christmas gifts around the Christmas tree. You might have noticed we have an angel at the top of our tree instead of a star or whatever else people use.

Here’s the story behind that tradition…

When four of Santa’s elves got sick, the trainee elves did not produce toys as fast as the regular ones, and Santa began to feel the pre-Christmas pressure. Then Mrs. Claus told Santa her Mother was coming to visit, which stressed Santa even more. When he went to harness the reindeer, he found that three of them were about to give birth and two others had jumped the fence and were out, Heaven knows where. Then when he began to load the sleigh, one of the floorboards cracked, the toy bag fell to the ground and all the toys were scattered. So, frustrated, Santa went in the house for a cup of apple cider and a shot of rum.

When he went to the cupboard, he discovered the elves had drunk all the cider and hidden the liquor. In his frustration, he accidentally dropped the cider jug, and it broke into hundreds of little glass pieces all over the kitchen floor. He went to get the broom and found the mice had eaten all the straw off the end of the broom.

Just then the doorbell rang, and irritated Santa marched to the door, yanked it open, and there stood a little angel with a great big Christmas tree. The angel said very cheerfully, “Merry Christmas, Santa. Isn’t this a lovely day? I have a beautiful tree for you. Where would you like me to stick it?”

And so began the tradition of the little angel on top of the Christmas tree.

By the way, I suck at taking pictures.

Some shots of outside our office building a few days ago. Most of the snow now has since melted away. It’s supposed to be mid to high single digit °C for the next few days, so there might be time to try out the Leaf Hog one more time before spring.