Rail Master control panel. $349

Phew! Had the colonoscopy this morning and “all OK”. Only one polyp, which was removed, otherwise no problems. I am very relieved. I lost 3.5Kg in the pre-op diet regime and I feel another 5Kg lighter with all the relief from tension. So what did I do when I got home? I walked over the road and had a Hungry Jack’s Whopper and chips for lunch. Yeah, I know, but this was a comfort reward, and I had Diet Coke with it. That makes it OK. Back to the high fibre foods from now on. They really are beneficial.

It’s weird. You have no warning at all – one second you’re looking at the wall in the operating theatre, the next you’re waking up in the ward. There is no sensation at all of going to sleep and no sensation of time passing. Thank goodness we have the ways to do this.

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The photo above is a replica locomotive control panel, a physical embodiment of my train simulator control on the computer. I’m using software called Trainz which simulates, um, trains, on dozens of different routes in a score of countries, including Australia. You can either be in the driver’s seat looking forward, or outside the train watching it from some distance away. It has full sound effects and all the lineside scenery and stations and towns are as realistic as the computer allows.

With this new controller, arriving any day on my doorstep, I can actually push and pull the levers and push the buttons to make things happen. I don’t usually play games, but I do like this one.

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One problem is that my “old” computer, this one dating from 2009, is a bit slow for this simulator game and the scenery is very jerky. I’ve built up my new machine with a much better graphics card, so I’m hoping for a better result.

BUT! I’ve been building and fixing computers since the late 1980s and I have never had as much trouble as this one. It seems to be corrupting hard drives. I seem to have irretrievably lost my Images drive, with over 30,000 images on it. I knew there were a few bad sectors, but the whole thing is gone now. Attempts to revive it have failed.

It’s also lost my striped pair of Video drives. It showed them working for a day or so, but they won’t show now. I’ve had to disconnect them because if I lost them, I don’t have a backup – they were too big to back up.

OK, so I decide to start again and reinstall Windows for the third time. But I can’t get past the Setup stage, either from the actual Windows 7 DVD or from a Win7 Boot and Repair disk I have. It just spins its wheels in the Setup phase, never going any further. What the hell is going on?

Neither will the motherboard retain its BIOS settings. I have to go into the BIOS setup each time to make it boot from the DVD drive.  This is crazy. I’m beginning to wonder about crying “Faulty” on the motherboard (Gigabyte). So I’ll just plug on and see.

The wrecking crew, Channel 7 1994. We were dismantling our old friend, the Ampex ACR25 cart machine. We were sad about that, hence the black armbands (made from 2″ wide videotape).

Hmmm, colonoscopy on Monday. Bit apprehensive.

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Schadenfreude. Taking pleasure in someone else’s discomfort. The NSW Liberal government sets up an inquiry hoping to dig dirt and nail Labor, and ends up having dirt smeared all over themselves. The hypocrisy!

The Rabbott and his henchmen bray and crow about Craig Thompson and union corruption, but are being shown to be just the same. Let’s not forget that Peter Slipper was a Liberal member of parliament.  Yet his Liberal cronies absolutely trashed him when he moved to the cross benches and supported Labor. Hypocrites.

And the Rabbott made a huge show last year about Labor’s “Big fat new tax” (the so-called carbon tax). But despite his solemn promises, what have we got? A big fat new tax. Hypocrites.

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Habeas Corpus. “… requires a person under arrest to be brought before a judge or into court. The principle of habeas corpus ensures that a prisoner can be released from unlawful detention—that is, detention lacking sufficient cause or evidence.” (Wikipedia)

Asylum seekers have not committed any crime. It is NOT illegal to seek asylum in another country. Yet they are being unlawfully detained in Australian prison camps without evidence and without being brought before any judge. They are being kept in unlawful detention.

What does it take to get the Australian government, consisting largely of lawyers, to obey the law? They are in violation of the principle of habeas corpus.

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The hum goes on. I mentioned it in the last post. It’s driving me nuts. I’m going to have to complain to the Council.

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I was almost finished building up the new computer yesterday, and disconnected and removed two hard drives prior to installing different ones. I didn’t touch the C: boot drive.

But it would no longer boot up. I disconnected the new drives, removed and reconnected the cables for the C: drive, tried all the BIOS settings – no go. It seems the partition table had been lost or corrupted. I haven’t had this happen before.

There was nothing for it but to reinstall Windows. Easily done, but a waste of time. Luckily at this early stage there wasn’t anything much on the C: drive that was lost. I just have to reinstall a dozen programs. It’ll take a few more hours.

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As part of this new computer, I bought two external USB3.0 dual hard drive docks. They were listed at Altronics as reduced from $59.95 to $49.95. Fair price, I thought. I took two, as I said.

Then I had a browse in the shop and took two long USB cables and a 1m network cable at an average of about $11 each. Total of about $133 I thought.

I had to wait a couple of minutes at the counter for the guy to come from the back office. He was hugely apologetic at keeping me waiting, then told me he’d give me a discount for the wait. I said, no, it’s OK, don’t worry about it.

But the final bill came to $99.50. In effect the cables were free. I was amazed. And he threw in a magnetic desk toy to play around with.

Altronics, Balcatta. I’m impressed.

I need the caddies because although my new computer case has room for ten drives (eight hard drives and two optical drives, all of which I want to use), there are only six SATA ports on the motherboard. I hadn’t thought of that when I chose the motherboard. The external USB 3.0 caddies solve the problem, though, by adding four more. Just external, that’s all.