Living in the fringe

[altivo]

Well, working on it anyway. Adding the finishing touches to a handwoven scarf made from handspun yarn. Got it off the loom this morning early, had to finish fringed ends. I decided to do tiny braids with three threads in each. Oops. Well, it looks fantastic and detailed, but I think it took nearly as much time to polish off those fringes as it took to warp and weave the whole thing. Can't be, but it seems that way. Photos tomorrow, probably, after it's washed and pressed. A nice gray and blue plaid, simple and rustic. And part of the wool came from my own sheep.

Spent considerable time at work today restoring a Gates Foundation machine that had a crashed hard disk. I had ordered the replacement drive, which arrive on Friday. Rebuilding one of these from scratch takes days and is fraught with potential for critical error. Fortunately, we had another machine with the identical configuration, so I could use Symantec Ghost to clone the good drive onto the blank one. Well, in theory anyway. It turned out that the floppy drives on both machines were flaky, so neither would boot the Ghost client reliably. Finally I made a temporary substitution for the bad floppy drive on one machine, and transplanted the hard disk from the other into the same machine so I could run Ghost to clone the system locally. That worked, though having both drives on the same IDE controller slowed it down a bit. A couple of minor fixes, like altering the networking name for the new boot drive so as not to duplicate the original, and we were back and running. So now the kinds can once more waste reams of paper and piles of toner cartridges playing "Magic School Bus." Ugh. I was sorta hoping it would turn out to be permanently dead.

Off to bed with me. Gary leaves for class at 6:30 am, so everything must start early.

Comments

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

Symantec Ghost is one of my favorite tools. When I allowed myself the time (when they gave me comp time) I would keep my .gho's up-to-date in the event of a crash. When the laptop recently crashed and burned I only had my ghost from early 2008. Worked, but needed a bit of patching to bring it up to present.

I relented and updated flash player on the juvie computers so that they could access various games. Still have the sound off at the bios level though ;o)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

We used to keep ghost images of everything but I don't have the network storage for them any more. Fortunately, we usually have multiples of any machine I need to rebuild.

We used to keep Flash disabled "due to bandwidth issues" but now it is available in limited circumstances. I feel no obligation to provide viewing space for "you boob" at all.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

They could die permanently if you want them to, a certain kitty could help you out there ;)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Thanks but that would probably be worse. They're addicted to those two pieces of junk. If we lost the machines completely, they'd just have to be replaced and I have better things to do than set up what amounts to gaming toys in a secure enough way to keep kids from wrecking them.