(no subject)

After an extremely frustrating week of computer crashes (Nimda virus on a Windows machine and a screwed up boot record on the dual Windows/Linux system causing a kernel panic) it was nice to get down to some virtuous physical activity. Our self-defence course has finally got off the ground, with the first lesson yesterday. They seem a nice bunch of kids: two boys and ten girls, all about fifteen-sixteeen years. A lot of giggling but no goofing off or horsing around, and let's face it, expecting fifteen-year-old girls not to giggle is like expecting construction workers to keep their trousers above their bum-creases(U.S. readers should substitute "pants" and "butt" here, I think.

What was interesting was that while none of kids had problems physically, quite a lot of the girls just couldn't do a decent gi-ap (martial arts yell - kiai in Japanese). It just goes to show the weight of social conditioning when girls who can probably scream their lungs out at a pop concert get all inhibited when actually asked to shout at someone while kicking them. They'd walk up to their partner and do a passable stamp-kick, then, almost as an afterthought, make a little "mweek" sound. Don't these kids watch Xena?

BTW, if any readers who attended self-defence courses can give me tips on what they found useful - and more importantly, what they found counter-productive - please let me know.

fsck it!

No, that's not the expletive you think it is, it's geek-speak for "file system check". Running fsck is tedious enough, but running

reiserfsck --rebuild_tree /dev/hda2

makes watching paint dry look like a Hollywood blockbuster with car chases, explosions and torrid sex scenes. This is my umpteenth attempt - it keeps freezing at different points, leaving tantalising messages like "left 13671 27 sec" at the bottom of the screen in glorious black-on-white. You mean you froze with only 27 seconds to go? Damn you, Hans Reiser, and the horse you rode in on!

To be fair, the Reiser file system is a work of genius, in that unlike other systems, you can switch off the computer without shutting it down and it will almost always boot up again with hardly a murmur of complaint, unlike, say, Windows where you get a blue screen and a snotty message about not having shut down your computer properly (even if it was Window's fault), before Scandisk erases important bits of data. Almost always. This time I got the dreaded "kernel panic" message. Linux users know the terror that this causes. It's at this moment that you imagine all those Windows users you were so condescending to going "Nyeh nyeh, Linux crashes too!" And it's no use trying to explain that this is an extremely rare event and had the machine been running Windows, all data on it would probably be up in data heaven, sitting on clouds and singing algorithms. They won't understand.

Thank god there's no one else in the office at the moment.

(no subject)

OK, one last attempt at rebuilding the reiserfs tree, then if that doesn't work I'm going for a complete reinstall. Probabaly no one will notice anyway, and if they do, I'll just do the Microsoft trick and tell them it was an upgrade. Come to think of it, it probably will be.