Whining

The week has been OK. I went into work on Tuesday but haven't been able to get the car back up the track until today when it had cleared enough to manage it. Yesterday wasn't good as it snowed in the night and I had to reverse back down and it was so slippy it ended up in the hedge twice and lost the wing mirror cover on the left and the tray thing under the engine is now hanging off. Also managed to take probably a lot of tread off the tyres and overheat the clutch. Poor old thing.

Work has been a bit stressful, especially today since there were issues with Windows machines talking to the AIX boxes using NFS - since the AIX boxes are quite critical and I don't know all that much about them I was very reluctant to make unnecessary changes.

Today had to retrieve data from an ancient Compaq server running NT4 which had suffered a dead power supply and was too old to be backed up. I got the old 18gb SCSI drive out and hooked it up to a PC with a spare SCSI PCI card. The drive powered up and worked, but clearly the bearings were past it as it took 10 seconds to spin up and did so with a piercing whine. It was so loud and shrill I had to find some spare cardboard packaging and fashion a kind of audio muffling device to stop people complaining. Then had to find some way of capturing the data on the drive so the machine could be virtualised. All good fun.

Badminton tonight was good - had a really fun time despite not playing for a while. I did throw myself into getting a shot a little too much at one point towards the end though and my knee gave me a little tap on the shoulder and said 'Now, now, careful, matey'.

The Atari ST has sold but only for £15. Don't care though, that's more than I paid for it. The Vita and vintage laptops have also got bids, so yay on those.