Monthly Archives: March 2006

Disaster Strikes & Keychain!

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I haven’t been updating my blog recently for various reasons.
Firstly, with my new job I haven’t had as much free time as I had before, there’s been a lot of cricket on (England v India, South Africa v Australia and Sri Lanka v Pakistan all at the same time), and then on Thursday evening a bit of a disaster happened.

I was making a copy of the Greatest Game (see last blog post) for a couple of mates, as Sky Sports had repeated the highlights and i’d recorded it on DVD-R, so with my DVD burner i was able to quickly make copies. I was just testing the disc had copied ok in Frontrow (which had a kind of hacked installation to make it work on my mac) when it got jammed on fast forward. I couldn’t stop it, force quit frontrow, switch applications or anything, leaving me with one choice: Force restart!

9 times out of 10 this would probably have been fine, but this time something went very wrong – instead of the lovely boot panel “Welcome to OSX”, what I got was this at startup:

I left it till Friday before doing anything as I had a far more important “executive meeting” at the pub and thought it should be a simple case of archive and reinstall OSX. However, on friday, i tried booting up from the install DVD and it wouldn’t even do that. My biggest fear… Hardware fault sprang to mind. Out came the toolkit to take things apart and find out where the fault was. To confuse things further, I was able to boot into OS9 and could see the hard drive there – this suggested something else was at work, and it wasn’t as simple as it seemed.

While taking things apart i narrowed the problem down to the OSX hard drive which for some reason, when it was on the ATA bus it wouldn’t boot into OSX regardless of the startup media. So, i needed to replace it and Saturday morning is the computer fair in Central London. With a wad of cash I went there to fix things up while not causing too much bank balance damage.

It was a successful day, and for £147 I came back with two new hard drives, and a Firewire 400/USB2.0 enclosure
For the internal, I replaced the faulty Maxtor 120Gb with a Seagate Barracuda 120Gb – I wasn’t particularly bothered about the brand
For the external, I purchased a Maxtor 300Gb with 16Mb Cache – this would serve two purposes: 1. To recover what I could off the faulty drive, and 2. To actually be a backup drive

Here’s what the enclosure looks like sat atop my mac (the white box behind with all the Green LEDs is my ethernet switch, and you can see part of my cannon scanner to the left of the picture):
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Apologies for the quality of the photo, I took it with my 1megapixel camera phone and transferred it by bluetooth, as i couldn’t be bothered to get all the cabling out for my proper digital camera!
I think the silver goes quite well (it was also available in black) and at £20 for the enclosure including Firewire and USB cables i thought it was a bargain.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, 2 1/2 days later (copying 100Gb worth of files several times), everything is nearly back to how it was and I recovered all my data. Just need to reinstall a couple of GUI tweaks, Dev tools and reinstall a few add-ons again.

I will decide later on in the week whether to try and fix the old Maxtor hard drive and use it as my second internal hard drive, as currently I have the original 20Gb drive there. The extra 100Gb would be very useful and allow me to free up a fair amount of space on the OSX drive. Plus 120+120=240Gb which is less than the 300Gb external drive, so I would still be able to back it all up.

Just before setting out for the computer fair a package arrived for me in the post from my good friend MacHeadCase
It was a very useful gift, and it is now on my keyring:
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It joins all the other junk I have on there like my Pentium Processor that I drilled a hole in
It’s not just a keyring of a lizard, it’s very cleverly shaped tail and foot act as a bottle opener. Given how much I like beer it will almost certainly be of great use for times at a party when there’s bottled beer about!

The Greatest Game?

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I like many cricket fans around the world am speechless having just seen what could be talked about as the greatest match in One Day International Cricket ever

The match was won by South Africa and they win the 5 match series 3-2, but what was on show today was simply magical.

South Africa had convincingly won the first two matches, but Australia came back to win the 3rd and 4th with increasing confidence and with South Africa going into the final match without opening bowler and all rounder Shaun Pollock – only last week he topped the ICC rankings for best all rounder and bowler in One Day International (ODI) cricket.

So, all did not seem to be looking good, and it looked possible that Australia could become the 3rd side to come back from 2-0 down in a 5 match ODI series by winning today.

Australia started well with Captain Ricky Ponting winning the toss on what was a good track to bat on at the Johannesburg New Wanderer’s Stadium. In front of a capacity crowd they destroyed the South African bowlers on a flat pitch and a lightning fast outfield to score a world record 434 for 4. This was the first time in a 50 over international match that a team had scored 400 and this was an even bigger score than it looks as it was scored against quality opposition. The top 3 scores before this match on the list of the highest team totals had been scored against Kenya, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh who are the bottom 3 in the ICC team rankings. This total was scored at 8.68 runs/over

Ricky Ponting had top scored with 164 off 151 balls with contributions from all the top 6 batsmen. It looked like it would be a formality posting such a score and having the advantage of batting first in a Day-night match.

However, history is there to be rewritten as the South Africans came out to bat, they scored at just above a run a ball in the first power play matching the Australian’s scoring for the same stage in their innings – however they lost opening batsman Boeta Dippenaar early in the second over. This allowed a 187 run partnership between South African captain Graeme Smith and Hershelle Gibbs – Smith scored 90 runs off 55 balls and Gibbs made his top score in ODI’s: 175 off 111 balls blasting the Australian bowlers all over the ground. AB de Villiers went cheaply and then Gibbs played one shot too many leaving wicket keeper batsmen Mark Boucher to finish things off. He still needed to score at more than a run a ball and losing the last recognised batsman, Kallis at 327 for 5 with 13 overs to go it would be some feat if they could get there. Boucher had good support from Johan van der Wath however he was dismissed by Nathan Bracken who was the only bowler to come out of the match with respectable figures taking 5 for 67 (going for a mere 6.7 runs per over). Telemachus and Andrew Hall played a few shots but ultimately it was down to Boucher to score the winning runs and bring up his 50 with the number 11 batsman Makhaya Ntini as partner. He did it with a ball to spare and the celebrations began.

How many records were broken in this match? The list will be huge, including probably the shortest time period for having the highest team total in a ODI match. Mick Lewis’s figures of 10 overs no wicket for 113 are the most expensive ever and the match aggregate of 872 runs will take some beating. Add to that the record of most sixes in a match, highest team total to lose a match and the personal records for Hershelle Gibbs and Ricky Ponting for highest scores in a ODI.

I will have to watch the highlights again – if there’s been a better ODI match, I’m yet to see it

New Job

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Finally, looks like I start my new job on Monday – really looking forward to it
Had my handover today as my final day in my old workplace – new person seems to have picked it up alright – most of the handover consisted of me rambling about my 3 years of working for the NHS and what the job entails and then left them to it. But even to the last minute I had bits of information to offer. I could’ve spent 3 days doing that handover and still not passed on even half of the info I wanted to.
On my way home had a voicemail left saying my future boss had forced the occupational health clearance through today and even with just the one reference received so far I could start beginning of next week.
So Chase Farm it is for me – can’t wait! It’ll be working in the Informations department as a trainee Informations Officer with the prospect of being a proper member of the Information team. I’m gonna be doing MSSQL, Oracle and Access with the potential to be using Business Objects. It’s the M$ version of things but it’s better than working in Admin which I’ve been doing the last few years.

So, with the long weekend to go it’s back to full time work again – gonna be a bit of a shock. I think in the back of my mind I half wanted it to take a couple more days so I could have a few days off, but at the same time I am very glad that I don’t have any time where I’m not getting paid.