Despite trying in vain today to get my t-shirt printed, today has been pretty much me catching up on the internet. I feel almost as if the day has been wasted, as I have barely left my computer chair, and I have little motivation to do anything else. But then, I realise that I have absorbed information from computers around the world, and thus I am better informed of the technical world around me.
But aside from browsing Wikipedia (and nothing the lack of notable deaths in the past two days), I finally started looking at my hard drives, and started attempting to recover data lost many months ago. My former main drive, a nice little 120GB IDE drive still operates. I plugged it in, and despite all the data being corrupted, it still registers, and can still be read by less conventional programs. However I'm puzzled as to why it reads only as 80GB; this must mean that the 40GB partition in which I made my first Linux installation is still intact and operational and invisible to Windows. I'm puzzling over how to deal with that partition, I puzzled on how to get the data back from my drive. I have some work on there I really cannot lose, and I don't want to format it in case it is lost. But I'm getting impatient with this 20GB drive that I'm currently using, and impatient with this installation of XP that won't allow me to install anything with InstallShield.
The next thing to tackle is my pair of 160GB SATA HDDs. All my drives failed at the same time, and I attribute it to some kind of surge coming from a USB HDD that killed my computer a while back. They were operational enough to get data from, so I could save my music collection, and they worked at a slow pace until I low level formatted them, which never completed, and has made them useless since. I haven't tried that hard at getting them to work, but I'm starting again with my attempts. I want them to work so I can install all my preferred operating systems and finally has space to download lots of media files without having to back up every 4 gigabytes.
Yesterday was by comparison, eventful. After Emma left to go back to Wales, Mizuki and I started getting the preparations for the JCS Fresher Fair stall up and running. We wrote out a provisional calendar for the first semester, and then when we'd exhausted most ideas, went home. I received a call from Qian, who was moving in to a new house, so I picked her up from Asda and took her there, where we spent a large part of twenty minutes trying to find the way to drive there through the maze of estate dead ends and seemingly pointless walls. As her new flatmates weren't in, she had to wait with her shopping and I retrieved her suitcases stored in my house. When I returned, I dropped them off (having finally found the right road to get to her house), and re rearranged to meet on Monday.
As I was walking in to the house from driving back, Mizuki was leaving to meet Kiwako, whom I had intended to meet up with in Japan, but unfortunately did not. We went to th Chinese place that we always go to, and had a long chat about Japan and earthquakes and all sorts, and after eating we went back to the house and relaxed while Ki saw Kaori again and met Katou. Of the conversations, most were in Japanese, with Mizuki occasionally turning to me to translate whatever the topic was at the time. The most memorable part, for me at least, was when they were all talking, and laughing, and one particular word kept cropping up. I recognised it, and when Mizuki turned to me to explain how the Asahi building had an unfortunate arrangement of bubbles that led it to be known as the 'poo building', I informed everyone that I knew the word "unko". The group realisation of the fact that I had been picking up on every time they said the word 'poo' produced a wonderful reaction.
I offered Ki a lift back to her place, and she showed me around, and not counting the area it's located in, it's a nice place. It's suitably student-messy, and it felt a lot more relaxed (but conversely more limiting) than our place. I was slightly bemused to see she is using a very nice and relatively new Powerbook, which just adds to the repertoire of Japanese Mac users that I have been meeting recently. As it approached 3AM I returned home and finished watching the last of Ki's DVDs, and the end of Futurama. I have now seen every episode, and I am now angrier than ever that it met its end at the hands of a network.
A few days ago, while Emma and I were looking over Kaori's essay and correcting minor grammar mistakes, I noticed a misplaced apostrophe when referring to the ownership by something that is plural. When it was pointed out, Emma discounted it by saying that only an English teacher would notice that. What I find irritating about that attitude is that it contributes to the degeneration of language, as it slowly erodes into poorer and poorer grammar. I didn't expect this attitude from Emma, as she never seemed to me to be a grammar iconoclast, but if she takes that stance, then what hope do I have of instilling the traditional values of grammar. I feel the entire Lynne Truss movement is wasted, and the idea of good grammar has now become a gimmick. I'm further saddened by The Times adopting the American spellings of certain words. Perhaps in teaching English, I can correct some of these terrible crimes against literature.
Anyway, now that I have finished my tirade on writing, I'll use my spell checker and get along to bed (I don't proofread; most of my readers don't have time to read all of my entries, why would I?).
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