Monday, September 26, 2005

Okay, so, what have I been up to lately, you all may well ask? Or not; some of my best friends don’t read this blog. Fie! Fie, I say! Whatever that means.

Anyvay, I’m in an odd mood. I feel a need to describe my weekend, but it all seems so uninteresting, even to me. So, how to make it interesting? Let’s see what I can do.

Last week, I made plans with my parents to have them over on Saturday. This was to celebrate my new oven, which they graciously bought for me and was to be delivered Saturday morning. Why a new oven? Well, as I was warming it up about a month ago, the top heating element glowed white hot and began to spark. This struck me as probably outside of the normal operational range, so I switched it off; after that, the top element refused to even get tepid, no matter how hot the bottom element was.

So. Me and my parents met at Best Buy, where we picked out a nice, new oven: fast-heating range, time delay so you can put, er, something in your oven in the morning and have it switch on at 4:00. I can’t think of what I would want to place in a cold oven for eight hours before getting cooked, but who knows? Could come in handy.

Two guys showed up at 9:30 Saturday morning to install it; neither spoke English well, but they were quick and efficient. My old oven was out and my new oven was in, clock blinking, within fifteen minutes. Amazing. I signed, and off they went.

By the time my parents arrived, I had baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies. The oven works great, though it seems to be a bit hot. My parents and I had a great time, as usual, just chatting. For a good four hours. I baked a pizza and we just enjoyed each others’ company.

I spent Sunday wrestling with backups. Oh, the backups themselves are fine; I was testing them out. Which translated to performing a backup on Yasuo (my G5), then wiping the hard drive completely clean, re-installing the OS, and restoring from backups. I have a little script that restores the backups, but I hadn’t tested it yet.

So the morning was devoted to checking the backups, performing a local restoration of a few files, then a complete user account. Everything went smoothly. Then I held my breath and wiped the hard drive. Installed Tiger. Ran the restore script. Didn’t quite work right for my main account, so I tweaked the backup script and ran it again. Huzzah! Success.

Well, not quite. I had to re-install Microsoft Office and various Adobe applications from the CDs, and I can’t open Matrix Experiments Lain in Adobe Premiere. But everything else seems to work pretty smoothly.

But it’s a good feeling, knowing that even if I suffer a catastrophic loss of my hard drive, I can restore everything on my computer within a couple of hours.

Once that was done, I relaxed with Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team. It’s blowing me away. It’s a full-scale Gundam series, despite having only thirteen episodes. The protagonist’s views on war evolve, he faces moral crises, there’s a lot of great giant robot action, and there’s even a romance that’s much stronger than any I’ve seen in other Gundam series. Fantastic anime.