One of those days...

The morning was going so well...

I walked the dog, did my calls and we had a cunning plan to drop the car off in Redmond, do the MS company store and I could do a meeting before getting the bus back to Seattle.

However...  it looks like _somebody_ went to work with the only set of car keys for our Jeep and with the Honda due back from the shop today, we have a transportation problem.

*sigh*

Not a lot I can do about that and not a good day for M to leave her mobile at home. 

A Personal Bugbear of Enormous Proporitions...

A simple division issue | Samizdata.net

The trolls over at Samizdata have an issue with the Evil(tm) EU forcing the metric system on poor Brits who have Tradition(tm) on their side.  The poor Brits are backed up by the Americans. 

The issue is over the Metric system and the bit that gets me frothing at the mouth is the idea that some how the Imperial/English system is intuitive and deeply ingrained.

It is only ingrained in people who grew up with it.  I live with a person who grew up without it, and without the EU to "force" it down her throat too.  She doesn't find it remotely intuitive... The Farenheit scale isn't a magical system which makes sense out of the box - it's a made up Kludge of numbers we impose to make order of the world.  75F is warm, so is 24C - anything over 30 is hot, between 10 and 20 is cool, under 10 is cold, below 0 is really cold.  It's simple no?

Likewise weights and measures, a pound and a half kilo are the same for everyday purposes, a metre is a little more than the span of a tall man's arm - only slightly more than the yard...  And so on and so forth.

It's what you grew up with and how you train your brain to quantify the world, no more, no less.

Of course, if you want to really annoy me, let's discuss the much vaunted Imperial system and how it handles liquids.  Especially the Fluid Ounce and the Pint.  Especially between the UK and the US.

Let's just let Imperial measures slip quietly into that good night and stop pretending that they every made sense.

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Back Up You Bastard...

For some reason the new box has been BSODing every night I've left it on before the back up kicks off.  So I set off a manual backup this morning.

It also makes me more inclined to agree with the next door neighbour who is firmly of the opinion that I need to install 32bit Vista over the top of the the 64bit install.

It certainly seems to be a nasty kludge at the moment.

Given the transport issues today, I'll have to go to the MS store tomorrow for a family copy of 32bit Vista.

In other news - the parts for the New Media Center arrive tomorrow and it will be something of a beast.  I'm rescuing parts from other PCs and so forth which keeps the price down.  However, I've got a nice Motherboard with decent video card with HDMI and Optical Audio output, 4GB ram and a chunk processor, all inside a nice Shuttle case.

The DVD player has died so we're going to see if this box really can handle everything.  I'm not 100% sure but we'll see.  I have downloaded a 1080p test file which will be the real proof.

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