Somehow the last few days have been particularly busy. Finally I had time to catch up today
and address most of the mail that has been waiting for me. I still didn't make it all.
Into town today. Apart from a haircut and a visit to the Fruit Shack, Yvonne wanted to look at a carpet for sale in Mount Clear. We were to meet there.
OK, get the directions from Google
Maps and send them to my phone. See that the notification arrived, head off. Enable
the route. It's gone! For no obvious reason, the notification had disappeared. And the
only way to get the information, including the all-important address, would have been to go
back inside to a Real Computer and send it again.
No time for that. But Yvonne had told me: down to the roundabout, first left, first left.
So I tried that. It wasn't nearly as obvious as it sounded, and I found myself driving
around for a while. But Yvonne was there: find her on the map and go to her. And how about
that, I found her in Cartilage Cartledge Avenue. I recognized that name: the
house is there. But she went straight across the road and back the way I had come from.
OK, follow her. After a while she stopped, leaving me blocking an intersection, and told me
that her phone had claimed she had arrived when she was 500 m from the destination.
Fortunately, round that time, the people we want to visit called and gave us the exact
address.
The carpet itself was a disappointment, but I discovered that there was a much easier way
back to Sebastopol:
just head up west on Cartledge Avenue, turn left onto Tinworth Avenue and we'd hit
Whitehorse Road, the road to Sebastopol. In Tinworth Avenue I asked Google Maps to take me
to Arabella. But instead of giving
me a route, it held a lecture about where it might be. When I finally got it to shut up, it
disagreed with my route. Turn back and go down Cartledge Avenue, 1.1 km further. Ignored
that and headed onwards, where there were no issues beyond traffic on Whitehorse Road.
Done? Not at all. Driving on to the Fruit Shack, it lost its mind, or at least its vision:
Still no map, but it had decided that I should go by foot! How do I change that? It took
me 5 minutes to find that it had hidden the choice of transport down some unlikely menu at
bottom left. Finally I briefly emerged from the darkness:
Backups to my first new disk went well. Today's the day for the weekly swap, so put in the
second disk. First, connect to distress to save the disk contents (one
Microsoft Start_Here_Win.exe and a whole slew of programs
in Start_Here_Mac.app). That was a pain: to be on the safe side, I was running
the CMD.EXE as administrator, with the unexpected result that it didn't see any of my
“network shares”, and it
took me a while to work out what was wrong this time.
Preparing the disk for FreeBSD was easier,
but not as easy as it should have been: I wrote down the steps last week, but I got them wrong (now corrected). Here what I did today:
Get the newfs parameters from /Photos and use them to create the new file
system:
Instead of the normal 10 seconds, it took DxO 25 minutes to process the image! My
guess is that it was performing lots of little transfers, each of which got held up by the
disk load of the backup.
Interestingly, this disk identified itself differently. Last week there was no relationship between the serial number on the package and the
serial number of the disk. Today the package stated a serial number NT17MDRZ,
which the device expanded to 00000000NT17MDRZ, and the name was also different:
Jun 11 11:21:09 eureka kernel: da2 at umass-sim2 bus 2 scbus6 target 0 lun 0
Jun 11 11:21:09 eureka kernel: da2: <Seagate Expansion HDD 1802> Fixed Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device
Jun 11 11:21:09 eureka kernel: da2: Serial Number 00000000NT17MDRZ
Jun 11 11:21:09 eureka kernel: da2: 400.000MB/s transfers
Jun 11 11:21:09 eureka kernel: da2: 15259647MB (31251759103 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 1945332C)
Jun 11 11:21:09 eureka kernel: da2: quirks=0x2<NO_6_BYTE>
Shopping at the Fruit Shack is always frustrating. They have lots of good things, some of the time. Today I found
even less of the items on my shopping list than normal. To make the point, I found more of
them at the nearby Ballarat Asian Grocery, where I normally don't find much.
As if that wasn't enough, I had had problems with an item I bought last time:
I had noted it at the time because it had no identifying label, though clearly it was dòufu
puffs. And when I got round to using them about 10 days ago, they had gone mouldy! The
use-by date is clear: 11 September. So I asked the cashier for a refund. “But they haven't
expired yet”. Tried to make it clear that they were mouldy, but I'm not sure she
understood. “Why didn't you bring them earlier?”. “Look, you can call this number” (on the
receipt). Neither would have helped if they hadn't been mouldy at the time. Call the
manager, please. Sorry, no manager here. Finally, as a gesture of good will, she accepted
it, not before I got seriously angry. And the query about the cost of some pork balls went
nowhere, since they were out of stock and I couldn't show them what I bought. She just said
“That was a Chinese cashier”, something obvious here where nearly everybody is Chinese.
Only she is Indian or similar. Somehow the cashier name on the receipt seems appropriate:
“Simple”.
What do I do? The Fruit Shack is getting more and more on my nerves, but they're a valuable
resource, and I don't want them to get into trouble.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
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