Call for new Top Level Domain - .ent

It occured to me today, as I mistyped my e-mail address for the millionth time, that there should be a top level domain for fans of "The Lord of The Rings". It would be ".ent".

Slug-a-go-go

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been having some trouble with my slug. Back from my travels to India and the USA, I've tackled the job of changing the disks I use. After a lot of false starts, I found a useful article called "HowToSwapDrivesOnUnslung" which I followed, using a "live" disk of Ubunto "Fiesty Fawn", to partition my new drives and to copy all the data from my old drives to my new ones. To cut a long story short, when I plugged the new drives into the slug and powered it on all was well. I'm now running live on the new disks and I've dared to wipe the old backup disk. So far, so good. We'll see how well the slug stays up - it "feels" healthier - but I'm old enough not to trust my feelings on this.

For those with an eye for the detail, my slug is running Unslung V2.3R29-uNSLUng-5.5-beta, the old drives were LaCie 300728EK 250GB 7200rpm External USB 2.0 Hard Drive Design by F.A Porsche, and the new ones are Seagate 320GB USB2.0 External Hard Drive with 8MB Cache. The new ones seem to spin down after a period of non-use, unlike the old ones. I hope the new drives give more than a year of service.

Brie is not a cheese

I thought I'd recount a story that one of my friends told me last week. The setting is a large company, where slowly the Corporate IT department is standardizing everything it can. For whatever reasons, the computers in my friend's workgroup were all named after cheeses: cheddar, stilton, etc.

However, when the time came to add another machine, the IT department said "We're sorry, you can't call it after a cheese, we have to follow the corporate standard naming convention. Now, the machine is located in Bristol, so the first three letters of its name are B-R-I. And then, as it's an engineering machine, the next letter is E, followed by a three digit serial code. So the name of your new machine is B-R-I-E-1-3-4".