Articles by peter

Well, our bags are packed, we’re ready to go. etc..

We shipped 51 cardboard boxes to Canada on Monday, sold or threw away the rest of our possessions, and now we wait in a house, empty except for futons and a couple of suitcases (and of course a macbook).

Jessica graduates from とくえいじ保育園 (Tokueiji Hoikuen) in the morning, the real estate guy comes to check out the house at 3pm - we hope to get some of our ¥500,000 deposit back, and then to an airport hotel.

It will be quite sad, 12 years in Japan is a fairly large chunk of life, still, we’re looking forward to our new life in Canada, although we will miss the people we’ve come to know here.

This is me handing over my old car keys to its new owner.

Now using wordpress.

Movie

No, I did not actually film this, due to broken video camera, now replaced, but this is Jessica’s last happiokai at tokueiji hoikuen.

Jessica’s Tanabatakai was on Saturday, she had fun. This is a
picture of her and Kie-chan wearing their yukatas. It was her first time to
see fireworks of any kind. Her comment - "Smokey".

It was certainly nice to have two days off for the weekend. It seems
like an age when your weekend usually consists of just Sunday.

My niece asked for an update. This is an update.

Really though, some things have happened, I got work building pacakges
for The Written Word on a part
time basis. It’s fairly interesting.

My daughter is growing up, see some pictures at pic.pogma.com(slow!)

Oh, yeah, almost 2 years without smoking, not too bad. Now if only I
could stop gaining weight.

Well, that’s it for another year!

So I got a new disk drive, it is a hitachi 40 Gb Model HTS548040M9AT00. It has
a problem. I thought "This drive is making funny noises", so I
took it out and put it back in again, thinking that I had screwed up the
installation. But it still made "funny" noises. So I looked for a
S.M.A.R.T. tool for Mac OS X that would tell me in advance that the drive would
fail. I found SMARTReporter
but it was not quite what I wanted.

So I looked around for info. google was
very helpful, as usual and provided a draft spec for the ATA/ATAPI-6 spec.
Hitachi was also good with their drive spec sheet. So I wrote Maxwell to check out the drive.

All is well, you say, well not exactly. The drive says it has a Load/Unload
Cycle Count of 16251, and that it is guaranteed to last at least 300,000 load/
unload cycles… lets see, it has been installed for 20 days, that means that
it will exceed 300,000 load/unload cycles in about a year… Hmm..

Update: Just released maxwell-0.5.1, really need to try the install target
in future.

It is making those noises again, the little whirr, the clunk, the scrape. I hate
the darn noise, but I am getting quite used to it. The drive in this powerbook
is the third one it has had. It seems to eat hard drives at a rate of one a year