January 06

pulling the goalie



I have stopped using irssi for my IRC client in favour or ERC. I am very used to irssi and never thought I would need anything else but ultimately having Emacs taking care of my email, IRC, editing and music playing makes things easier for me. I do much less `moving around' between windows and now all my copy and paste operations, plus configuration, documentation and searches use the same familiar key bindings. ERC will take some getting used to but I will get the hang it I am sure.

I will try also to remove myself from channels that I don't really participate in, but this might prove difficult as I consider myself the consumate lurker and hate to miss anything exciting. It would be nice though to only have say five or six channels to manage. We will see how that goes.

Now that I have finished sorting through the CD's my friend lent me, it is time to transfer them onto an external USB that I can give to him. It needs to be Windows formatted (NTFS) so I was thinking of using Samba but I recall doing this before took over a day and that was not with the 165GB that I have now. I might try putting the music onto dual layer DVD discs. That way I can copy them to his computer relatively quickly, plus I would have a third backup on removable media that I could easily store somewhere in case of something awful happening to my hard drives.

I estimate I would need about 19 discs for this, which is quite expensive but the real problem is knowing how much to put on each disc to use the minimum of discs and to make each disc useful in itself, in other words not to `span' discs so that you'd need all of them to recover one disc. Sounds like a good little programming exercise.


When your team is trailing, late in the hockey game, you can do what is known as `pulling the goalie', the phrase has another connotation, when a couple decide not to continue using contraception, but I digress..

Basically, you remove your goalie in favour of an extra attacker and hope to even the score, however it is a risky move as it is very easy (so one would think) to score a goal against a team with no goaltender. Last week poor Patrik Stefan found out how difficult the empty net is to score against.


Posted by æc♥ | Permanent Link