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?

[davv]

I saw the moon last night! It was easier to spot than usual, and looked larger too.

After all those once-in-a-decade things (full equinoxes and the likes) I've missed because it's almost always been overcast over here at the interesting days, it's a nice thing to be able to see something for once!

After repeated experiments with CHKDSK, none of which ran to completion, I gave up.

I seem to remember getting those problems once, when I was still working at [badly managed place X] fixing computers. CHKDSK got locked in a loop saying something about $0. The trick in that case was to force CHKDSK to skip that check, fix the rest, then do a full fix... but by what you're saying, seems like it's no longer relevant since you're just going to wipe the disk :)

Oh, and I see we now have Obama's war to add to Bush's wars that are not yet resolved.

At least it's more like Clinton's war (Kosovo) than Bush's. It's not just "let's introduce democracy by the barrel of a gun!", and there's actual UN backing.

[farthing]

And I thought it was just the usual optical illusion, when I saw the large looking moon in the horizon.

On the hard drive issue, I was wondering if the manufacturer diagnostic tools still work. Though I've had those to lock up as well...
Might be interesting to run Spinrite on it too, though it might choke on the large drive size. And it has a price tag attached to it too. And in the end, full reformat should do the same trick anyways, unless there's some progressing physical damage on the platters.

[moonhare]

The moon was crystal clear here last night. A beautiful start to Spring.

"The War." I haven't figured out why we got involved in Iraq, never mind Libya. Maybe the shelf-life is up on all those 1980's cruise missiles and they needed to dump them somewhere.