Stray Dog Strut

Spent most of last night working on a cd for the Spanish students we had staying here a few months ago – Alberto and Veronica. I’m puting their video captures on a CD to send to Spain.

The originals were in .mov format which didn’t seem to be supported by the software I was using so I converted them to .avi files using the free RAD video tools software. Unfortunately .avi files are huge so the few gigs I have left on my hard disk soon filled up.

But wait – I have a second hard disk that i’m currently using to try out Debian Linux. If I remove Linux and reformat i’ll have another 40 gig to play with – simple no? Eh No.

2 hours later and i’m still trying various fdisk commands to get rid of, firstly, the Lilo bootloader I have to choose the OS I want to start, and secondly, to wipe all the Linux stuff off the hard-disk.

Getting rid of Lilo was easy: simply typing fdisk/mbr overwrites the master boot record (where Lilo lives) with the default. The problem was deleting the partitions containing Linux.

Fdisk showed 2 partitions on my second drive – 1 non-dos partition and 1 extended partition. I deleted the non-dos partition easy enough (options 3, then 4 in fdisk I think) but the extended partition wouldn’t budge.

I repeatedly tried to delete it only to get the message that it could “not be deleted while Logical drives exist” – but fdisk told me there weren’t any?!

To cut a long story short, and solve this problem for anyone else, this is the solution I Googled:

1) Type fdisk/status at the command prompt to check the drive number (in this case 2)
2) Manually create a logical drive on this disk by typing fdisk (drive number)/log:250 where 250 is the size in megs.
3) Then in fdisk, select the option to delete the logical partition

(restart the computer as the next step still didn’t work for me until I did this)

4)Delete the extended partition in fdisk.

All groovy=) After all that, and creating the new DOS partition and formatting it, I only had enough time to convert the video files and import them into my project – i’ll play around with it a bit more after some stress relief with Lionhead’s God-Sim Black & White=)

I tried to select my text to copy it before I published but it got wiped, grr, but atleast I’ve decided on my title now! Here is roughly what I wrote:

Just a wee trip down memory lane – it’s a song we used to sing at Halloween when we were guising (Trick or Treating for our American brethren). I couldn’t remember how to spell hapeny but a Google search gave me the above and several versions of the tune – but this is the version we used to sing.

Had a great time in York with FallingStar at the weekend. To fill you all in, Falling is my gf of 4 years and 8 months. We met online in a chatroom hosted by www.bolt.com – I was Garfield back then, and sometimes still am. She was FallingStar. We got chatting and found we had alot in common – we used to chat on MSN every night, and I always got a huge buzz from just talking to her.

We decided to ‘go out’ in February 2001 but it wasn’t until the August that i went down to London to meet her for the first time (Although we still mark our anniversary as Feb 1st). Despite all the thousands of things that can go terribly wrong with a meeting like that (DON’T DO IT OR ATLEAST DON’T GO ALONE KIDS), fate smiled on us and it turned out perfect for us. Falling did not turn out to be a sweaty 40-year old builder as my brother predicted!

Almost 5 years later and we’re still together, regularly commuting between London – Edinburgh and now York – Edinburgh as Falling is at uni there. She’s in her final year studying Sociology.

I had a great time this weekend. We went to see Stomp! at the theatre. For those of you who’ve never heard of it, it’s a bunch of people who make music using everyday items – everything from matchboxes to dustbins and industrial plastic piping. The show was fantastic – there’s no talking whatsoever, just music and comedy: One guy played the ‘village idiot’ type role and was always getting it wrong or being picked on by the others – hilarious!lol

What’s more, because it’s all musical, it’s perfect for any nationality, and perfect for Falling who is profoundly deaf. She can lip-read very well and speak English very well, but she really appreciates music – the only true universal language.

We started our xmas shopping – I won’t say what we got as I don’t want to spoil the surprise incase family members read this – but it’s got me all excited! I’m probably going to get Falling’s gifts this month when I get paid. We also saw some sweet teenage navy(?) cadets parading around York, and got harrassed by some angry geese, lol

Anyway, it’s back to the daily slog at work tomorrow so I better hit the sack. I’ll keep y’all posted=)

I’m still beaming proudly at my shiny new Sony Ericsson K750i phone. My first contract phone and it’s great – colour screen, camera, handsfree kit, memory card and my first experience of bluetooth=)

So far I’ve managed to cram the following on it to be keep me ‘in my bubble’ for the bus ride to work -

Theme tunes:

Cowboy Bebop “Tank” opening
Battlestar Galactica intro (The new series)
Buffy The Vampire Slayer intro
Neon Genesis Evangelion intro
Hellsing intro
Metal Gear Solid 2 theme tune
Outlaw Star intro
Cowboy Bebop “The Real Folk Blues” ending
Samurai Jack intro
Metal Gear Solid 3 “Snake Eater” song (sounds like a Bond theme but it’s class)
Teen Titans intro

Music:

Gwen Stefani’s “What You Waiting For?”, “Rich Girl”, “Hollaback Girl”, “Bubble Pop Electric”, “Harajuku Girls”, “Crash”, and “Serious”.

Blues Brother’s soundtrack songs “She Caught The Katy” and “Sweet Home Chicago”.

“The Power of Love” (From the Back To The Future films remember?)

“Stuck In The Middle With You” (From Reservoir Dogs)

And on top of that there’s an FM radio=) I’ll prob change some tunes soon as “She Caught The Katy” is losing it’s effect and Buffy doesn’t sit right amongst the Anime and Game tunes, oh well!

Thanks to Youkai Nao for the welcome (2nd post) – yes Cowboy Bebop is fantastic! It was the first anime series I ever watched and a good way to get me hooked. Others i’ve seen so far include- Ghost In The Shell, Spirited Away, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Princess Mononoke, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Outlaw Star, Hellsing, Ninja Scroll…that’s all I can think of at the moment but i’m sure there’s more. Embarrassed to say I haven’t seen Akira yet but it’s on my wanted list=)

Well i’m heading down to York at the weekend to see FallingStar so I won’t be back til sunday night – more on what that’s all about later!;-) My cold is shifting but my head is splitting and the irate customer I had to entertain for twenty minutes at the end of the day on the phone at work didn’t help. Spanish was fun, same stuff as last week but a good reminder=)

“Hasta leugo”