Giant moon night

[altivo]

Tonight is the perigee full moon. The moon is at it's closest point to the earth and also full. These two conditions coincide only about once every 19 or 20 years. The moon will look about 14% larger and appear 30% brighter than it does when at its greatest distance. It was certainly bright enough last night to cast shadows and read by. I can't say about tonight, because we are overcast. If you have a clear sky be sure to take a look.

After repeated experiments with CHKDSK, none of which ran to completion, I gave up. Every sure-fire cure offered by web pages and individuals made no difference at all. CHKDSK on Gary's drive simply stalls near the start of phase 2 and sits there. I let it sit for more than eight hours on the last attempt, with no sign of progress. The task was using no CPU cycles and a fixed amount of memory when I killed it.

Instead, I went into the Windows Registry and altered the autocheck invocation on boot up so that it will no longer try to check that drive. Gary was finally able to retrieve his files from the drive, and so far all have been intact and usable. Once he has all the files he needs off, we'll try formatting the drive. It's a 1.5 TB SATA drive, so I expect a low level format will take many hours too. It's under warranty, so if it won't format, we'll get it replaced.

Not as springlike today as I'd hoped, but at least it was sunny. Birds are coming to life: cardinals and robins singing, blackbirds calling, woodpeckers drumming. I saw a huge hawk late this afternoon, circling and circling overhead. Probably hoping for a try at one of the neighbors' kids...

Oh, and I see we now have Obama's war to add to Bush's wars that are not yet resolved. While I agree it is time for Qaddafi to give up his power in Libya, the hypocrisy of the US accusations and behaviors in this are just too overwhelming for words.

Comments

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

I'm not good at keeping mental track of lunar cycles, but did notice the big beautiful moon rising over Mount Rainier here this evening.

And yeah, I tend to agree with Libya. Gadaffi is not a nice guy, no doubt about it, but I'm not confident the rebels are innocent of not hitting civilian targets. The rebels are armed and it is a civil war. If we claim to use our military to prevent genocide and massacre, there are worse tyrants than Gadafi waging genocide in the world, such as Darfur. Not a lot of oil there to pique our interest though ... that wouldn't be why we're butting it, would it?

Has there been any time since World War II that we've been at war with three nations simultaneously?

[altivo]

Well, you'd have to start by defining "at war." Officially no. Officially we're not at war now. There's no Congressional declaration. Same as Vietnam, with thousands killed and dragging on for years. It was never a "war" it was a "conflict" or a "support action." The Library of Congress persisted in calling it the "Vietnam Conflict" for two decades after it ended before changing it to "Vietnam War."

I see they fired 110 Tomahawk missiles yesterday. At over half a million apiece, that's at least 55 million dollars spent right there. But we can't afford five million for NPR or even one million according to the Congress-jerks just elected by our ignorant voters. Billions to blow people up but not one cent for education. Back to the Republican way of living. "Promoting democracy one bomb at a time." Right.

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

But, at the same time, where would we be if the French didn't help out disloyalty against Britain?

[altivo]

In my opinion, probably pretty much where we are today anyway. In the long term, such bumps in the road tend to even out.