Federal Agents Raid Office of Special Counsel


Essentially, the news item is a dismayingly familiar tale of (alleged) malfeasance of office and abuse of power. The part that grabbed my attention, in a pointing-and-laughing sort of way, is:


I have a mental image of a petty crook confident that he can't possibly be caught because he saw some clever trick on TeeVee.

I woke up last night and found that the desktop had shut itself off. My three working theories were:

1. Some oddity caused during installation of ActiveStinc (and ActiveSync Toggle to address the fact that, no, I don't need it using up computing power 99.9% of the time) to enable direct connection of our Wings and the desktop (until now, we've only used the laptop for that purpose).

2. A fan/heating issue.

3. Power failure caused by UPS failure or feline intervention (the big red power button is on top of the UPS unit).

It didn't give any of the "Windows did not shut down normally" messages that would result from a crash or power cut, which leads me to suspect #1. However, it seems to have stayed on all day after my reboot this morning.

As for why I'm here posting this instead of off with Three Left Feet -- apparently the northbound Yellow Line trains weren't running even to the usual lackadasical schedule, and the information board didn't indicate any coming for at least the next 15 minutes (i.e. about the time my last good "bail and make my way home" window closed).

I've been playing a bit more with adding documents to my T-Mobile Wing. So far, it seems to handle Word docs much better than the old PDA (especially documents with pictures).

One odd thing I've noticed is that the "wrap to window" option has an odd little bug that causes a superfluous horizontal scroll bar to appear when an open document begins with exactly one paragraph of text followed by a picture wide enough to require down-scaling to fit in the window. Once I noticed the pattern, the word-around was fairly obvious ("It hurts when I do this." "Don't do that!")

I've been getting random crashes on the desktop. At first I thought it might be a problem with Exact Audio Copy, but they didn't always happen when (or even after) using it.

I resorted to a full data backup and restore to factory configuration, and still got a crash, indicating a hardware problem.

Opening up the box, I saw a memory chip holder that didn't seem to be quite properly engaged. I reseated the RAM chips a few hours ago and have been reinstalling/recopying stuff ever since; no crashes so far. (I did have a minor scare when a game install gave an error message -- turned out it wanted to open a Word document and I hadn't yet reactivated MS Office).

I ended up switching to Exact Audio Copy, because it turned out to be easier to get it to neatly integrate FLAC encoding for fire-and-forget ripping and encoding. Also, it gives more information on potential timing problems during the rip (though it's always been a false alarm when I did a test rip and CRC checksum comparison).

I also had the idea of making backups on DVD-R with a cumulative index.

My desktop appears to dislike connecting the external drive through a front USB port; I got a BSOD. I suspect that it might be a port power issue or resource conflict. Another ongoing issue is that the boot cycle stalls at the "searching for USB mass storage devices" stage unless the all-in-one unit (a Canon MP830) is turned off during the boot. On that one, I suspect a conflict between the memory card readers built into the MP830 and the ones integrated into my floppy drive.

If either or both of these are correct, disconnecting the card reader unit in the floppy drive might resolve the issues (the reader slots in the all-in-one are much easier to reach in any case). This leads to the question of whether it's worth bothering to buy and install a plain floppy drive; I can't recall the last time I used a floppy (including the one time my system had to be steam-cleaned and everything reinstalled from scratch and restored from backup for reasons unrelated to the above).

That raises my curiosity: How long has it been since anybody else actually used a floppy disk?

(I ended up disconnecting the MP830 and connecting its USB cable to the external drive to perform the backup, with no problems except the inconvenience. I may need to pick up a USB hub, if I can find room on my desk.)

So far, I've gotten a hundred-odd (with or without hyphen) CDs backed up in lossless format; I've paused to back them up to the new external hard drive (about a half hour, but can be done in the background).

I've also unearthed the batch of jumbo CD albums with the bulk of my filk and folk collections.

Inspired by a fortuitous find (a 500 GB external HD on sale for $85), I've finally gotten around to getting the various piles of CDs ripped. The plan of attack is to rip them with Audiograbber, convert them to FLAC (a lossless compressed format) to reduce the space needed for the master archive, and to convert files to MP3s as needed (or as Round TUITs are gotten) for routine listening.

After downloading and installlng a batch of IrfanView plugins, my desktop decided that it was no longer on speaking terms with the Internet. Fortunately, the wireless laptop connection through the router still gets online, and I was able to re-establish contact between the desktop and laptop by assigning a static IP to the desktop's Local Area (Ethernet) connection. For now, I'm backing up all documents from the desktop to the laptop in case I need to steam-clean and reinstall (after six months, Windoze probably needs that anyway, but I would prefer it to be some time other than a week before Conterpoint -- it won't actually fubar any convention-related stuff, but will be a significant loss of time and energy that's needed in other places).