My main PC's system disk died this morning.
I've seen it coming, there have been a couple of times when the system has hung recently which had never ever happened previously on this two and a bit years old PC. Luckily I have clones of my system drive so I just slid one into one of the rather wonderful Icydock multi-hard drive bays, no need to even open the PC. I booted up and then copied over what little data is kept on the system drive from the previous night's back-up courtesy of Acronis True Image(which also did the disk cloning) and before you could say Jack Robinson a few times everything was back and running as though nothing had gone wrong at all.
I'm actually quite glad it's happened, I knew I had a system in place to handle such eventualities and had tried simulating a failure to check it worked but there's nothing like the real thing to confirm it really does get one out of a hole.  Smug?  Yes, maybe a little...but it does serve as a reminder to all of you out there in interwebland the importance of backing up and not just the obvious photo files....backup everything and then you will be safe!
PS: Two posts in a week!!!  What on earth is going on?  Fear not, normal sporadic posting service will almost certainly now be resumed.
20070824 13:40
So, off to the Dome to see the Rolling Stones (apparently one of their last ever live dates) last night courtesy of my brother, DeeJay.
I've always liked the Dome and am really glad to see back in use again even if it has been given a molecular name in the process. Apparently the venue can hold up to 23,000 but it seemed somewhat more intimate than that, even to us up on the eerily steep sides where slight vertigo sufferers such as my brother and I clung to our seats like de-winged gannets. Or something.
Anyway, that you can get so many folk into such a space and not have it feeling cavernous is a triumph I think. The Stones? Well, they were the Stones...a somewhat strange eclectic selection of songs I thought, not the most obvious but with a set that includes ""Sympathy For the Devil", "Tumblin' Dice", "Honky Tonk Women", "Paint it black", "Satisfaction", "Brown Sugar" and "Start me Up" to name just a few one can probably forgive the omission of "Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown" and "Get of My Cloud" and the occasional bit of scrappiness. A very pleasant evening, thanks again to DeeJay.
The photo....well, just from the mobile phone....and though it appears to show UFOs firing lasers at Mick and Co and the band going up in one almighty fireball asa result, this isn't actually what happened. Far too many lights on that moving stage for my 'umble little PhoneCam to be able to cope (not able to go into manual to set the exposure you see).
Here, for even more fun is a short snatch of one of the songs.....your guess is as good as mine as to what it might have been before the Motorola got its recording algorithms to work on it.
20070822 13:29