Movember: Day 2. Hair Follicles Retreat

02-November-2007

Starting to become a habit. Popout the Microsoft LifeCam, stare into the camera. Photo, upload. All my facial follicles are on a follicular holiday underneath my skin. Or maybe they were frightened by the five-bladed razor yesterday.

Last night, Duncan Riley challenged me on “my personal sponsorship target”. AU$1000 would be cool. Now that’s a serious amount of dosh to help out BeyondBlue.

Movember - Sponsor Me

An Example of Geeks for Good

Last week South Australia celebrated Water Week. As a previous resident in the driest state on the driest continent, water and water conservation was drilled into us from a young age. The current water restrictions in many states pale into insignificance compared to living on a farm with limited water supplies.

Geeks for Good is a thought-seed planted by Cameron Reilly on G’Day world 299, and his subsequent call-out to the Podcasting world at podcampperth.

Two previous school associates, Dr Paul Dalby and Chris Hobart – along with a former work colleague, Mike Seyfang; have taken the power of the internet, borrowed an idea from WebJam and created Water PitchFest.

Using flickr, twitter, youtube, blogging, rss and podcasting – getting the story out about water projects.

The litmus tests: comments, emails, project executions but most importantly connections.

Toshiba Hard Disk Upgrade

As my internal 100Gb hard disk on the Toshiba M400 (T2400) had only 5% free space: even after archiving photos and podcasts, I could not reduce the free space to under 10%.

Time for a new HD. Purchased from Auspcmarket, 200Gb 7200 RPM Seagate Momentum drive.

As much as this Toshiba has limitations that are starting to annoy me (read: screen real-estate: can I have a new XPS now, please. ta.) – adding and deleting the hard drive was extremely simple.

Process

  1. Windows Vista “Windows Complete Backup” (in Backup and Restore) to second hard drive
  2. Physically remove old drive, install new drive
    1. remove two screws holding in the plastic cover
    2. use the plastic tab to remove the hard disk in it aluminium bay
    3. remove four screws holding the SATA hard disk in the bay
    4. insert and replug new SATA hard disk
    5. reverse install procedure.
  3. PXE boot from network, where we have a network based, System Recovery
  4. A pleasant UI appears; only confusing part was ensuring I had a copy of my disk drivers on USB
  5. Restore from the backup, onto the new hard disk.
  6. Reboot from new hard disk
  7. Using Computer Management>Disk Management, Right-click “Extend Volume” to the full 200Gb
  8. Done

Performance of the disk drive: 4.9 to 5.4; that is a10% increase.

Australian Politics on G’day World 299.

Debating with Cameron Reilly is like fighting an intellectual tornado. Thankfully I was being grilled after a bottle of merlot.

In the instance of this podcast, I am speaking for myself not my employer (which I make clear in the podcast)

In retrospect, the discussion could go on for another 30 minutes: the concept of Geeks for Good is a concept that is rattling around in my head.