A little birdie has told me Wilma thinks Fred did it to himself!

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Well I could tell you, but then I would have to kill ban you all.

I posit Vadim is a paid professional troll and possibly a skilled hacker.

Nothing that complicated

A shrewd guess: I'd say poor old Fred got a holiday over a censorship argument - cause being our Russian friend

Extremely far fetched and way off the ball

Yep, methinks Bernie had too much Vadim.

We all did

A little birdie has told me Wilma thinks Fred did it to himself!

You might think that, but I could not possibly comment


As to a certain foreign gentleman, he has 2 weeks to mend his ways, which seems unlikely, creating a second account to send nastygrams went a bit far.

Oh my... such mystery and intrigue over here!!!

So fun to keep everyone guessing.

Excitement. Car-B-Que. Busy moving paper from pile A to pile B. BANG! Bigger that your standard firecracker, more like an M-80. Look out the window to see if the kids across the way are playing games again. No, street is empty. Hear shouts. Take a look more up and down the street and there is smoke. Move to better see that direction and there are flames! Car-B-Que in progress. Call 911. Get hose. Essentially the entire company is now there. Eventually fire department gets there. Neighbor says one of his workers saw someone run away right when it started.

Car sits there most of the time. Looks like it was full of clothes. There is a camper parked right in front of it. Think they might belong together. Fire department can't get an answer, but there is a dog inside. Who leaves a dog inside a camper on a day with the high predicted at 100F?

Time will see how long it takes to get the burned out hulk removed by the city.

Checking in. It's too hot to go anywhere anyway (35C), plus I have had to stay out of the sun for a minimum of four days as I severely burned my left arm on Friday, on our biggest trip so far. The sun block didn't help. We'll go back to vacationing and tripping tomorrow, when it's supposed to be cooler again. And raining.

The night before our vacation started, the power button on my PC started acting up. It's got a blue LED in it, and it started flickering, going off, back on, etc. Checked all wiring, all was fine as I could see. It's now mostly off, with here and there a flicker of light. The system itself runs fine. Well, since I changed out a hard drive, as on the first day of the vacation my system wouldn't hibernate anymore. It always restarted with the Windows log in screen and telling me a catastrophic event had occurred.

That appears to be my Seagate Barracuda 2TB HDD, which runs very hot (it emanates heat really), and when checked with SMART would tell me that the Current Pending Sector Count and Uncorrectable Sector Count were showing a red mark, meaning replace this thing immediately.
So I borrowed a 6TB drive from Holly and copied both partitions over from the 2TB to the 6TB drive, and then removed the limping 2TB drive from my system into a docking station. Since that time my sytem's been running fine. Still with flickering power button LED.

Now, I am looking for a good way to remove the data on the disk and empty it out before handing it to the scrap dealer in the flat.
Remember in films and series where a person removes all data from his TB's of drives within seconds, before the police march in and find not a shred of a byte on the drives? I found it's not that easy. I can remove the partitions all right, but that doesn't remove the data. I can use AOMEI Partition Assistant to do the remove partition and wipe all data, but that's going to take "17 hours, 39 minutes and 46 seconds or more".

I'm wondering if the PC gurus around here know of a quicker way - one that doesn't include using a drill or sulfuric acid. :)
I cannot use the Seagate Seatools, as it doesn't recognize my docking station. I could use Windows' normal format (not quick) as that does a single write zero pass at the end of formatting, but I would prefer something that does multiple passes. Any suggestions?

The quickest method involves a steam roller followed by a chipper. And yes they do make chippers for magnetic disk drives. Large document shredding services have them.

Sorry about the time, but the erase program has to write to every sector. Take your drives sustained write speed* and divide by the size of the drive. Multiply by the number of passes. Add in a fudge factor.

*Likely degraded by now because of spared sectors.

Well this is a bonus for those living in some parts:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-45097563

Is it Tuesday? It's still up.

Yes, & still up. Someone's having a l o n g coffee break. :-)

It refuses to go down, probably because Jord checked in in the middle of his vacation.

It may be a staffing problem, summer holidays etc...

That was a short summer holiday. It's down now.

Another guess is that they were planning something long and difficult...

Not likely to happen when Eric is on a fishing trip.

Maybe the 3 outrage of the month ...

I don't feel like cooking tonight. I think I'll get something from this Thai restaurant:

http://simplythaiky.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Dinner-Menu-St.Matt-2017.pdf

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

And here I thought it had to do with main moderators doing banishments left & right and being banished. :D

Forgetting that it was Tuesday, I copied several jokes for the Joke thread. I'll post them here, instead.

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Angela Merkel arrives at Passport Control in Athens airport.

"Nationality?" asks the immigration officer. "German," she replies.

"Occupation?"

"No, just here for a few days."

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An old man lay awkwardly sprawled across three entire seats in the movie theatre and when the usher came by and noticed this, he whispered to the old man, "Sorry sir, but you're only allowed one seat."

The old man didn't budge.

The usher became more impatient "Sir, if you don't get up from there I'm going to have to call the manager."

Once again, the old man just muttered and did nothing.

The usher marched briskly back up the aisle and in a moment he returned with the manager. Together, the two of them tried repeatedly to move the man, but with no success.

Finally, they summoned the police.

The officer surveyed the situation briefly then asked, "All right buddy, what's your name?"

"Joe," the old man moaned.

"Where are you from, Joe?" asked the police officer.

With a terrible strain in his voice, and without moving, Joe replied... "The balcony."

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Registration on the first day back at school in Leicester England:

Mustafa Al Sheriah "Here"

Ahmed El Sheriah "Here"

Fatima El Bindiri "Here"

Ali Acmah Shabeeb "Here"

Ali Sun Al En No answer

Ali Sun Al En?

A little girl at the back stands up and says "it's pronounced Alison Allen."

I don't feel like cooking tonight. I think I'll get something from this Thai restaurant:

http://simplythaiky.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Dinner-Menu-St.Matt-2017.pdf

Looks more Asian combo than straight Thai. Still looks like lots of good things. Just too bad it looks like they have gone American with some of the ingredients like the mushrooms.
https://president-thai.com/pasadena/menu/
https://president-thai.com/pasadena/cuisine-photo-gallery/

Ah, finally, rain. For the first time since May do we have serious rain here, complete with light shows and loud noises and bangs. Gonna enjoy it, and at the end of it, stand outside in the rain. The lightning is a tad too much now to do so.

Ah, finally, rain. For the first time since May do we have serious rain here, complete with light shows and loud noises and bangs. Gonna enjoy it, and at the end of it, stand outside in the rain. The lightning is a tad too much now to do so.

Sounds like perfect weather to recreate Ben Franklin's kite experiment. ;-)

it's back...