“Sadly, I now feel that 2008 is very little about the people of Liverpool and community involvement and I am increasingly alarmed at the vast sums of money that have been spent and that are still required, with very little to show for it so far.”

bbc.co.uk/liverpool/content/articles/…

Cotebrook Shire Horse Centre

May 2007

I’ve struggled through a good portion of today trying to find a freeware, shareware or at the last a full commercial disk recovery product. A USB drive that got unceremoniously dragged by its cable to the floor seemed to have survived – until (of course) I ran chkdsk on it. Immediately following which the drive lost it’s boot sector for it’s only partition.

Windows wanted to format it, Norton just moaned at it, PCI File recovery (an excellent file recovery tool imo) allowed me to confirm that data was recoverable on it, but could not restore the partition. Mbrfix tried to fix it’s mbr, which tells you something of my knowledge of these things.

I’d resigned myself to the £21 plus VAT for Partition Table Doctor, when I eventually found this MS Support article, telling me exactly how to fix my own boot sector by hand. In under five minutes my partition table had been restored to sector 1 from a backup it apparently stores itself in sector 6. My disk was back.

Searching the web for partition, recovery, boot sector, fixboot and restore brings up so many commercial tools it’s as though parting with money is the only option. Not necessarily so.

BBC News, the death of Jean Baudrillard

Baudrillard, a leading post-modernist thinker, is perhaps best known for his concept of hyper-reality.
He argued that spectacle is crucial in creating our view of events – things do not happen if they are not seen.
Baudrillard focused his work on how our consciousness interacts with reality and fantasy, creating from them a copy world he called hyper-reality.

I have scrapped my first car today. Purchased on the 20th October 1998 and driven until September 2002. Four-and-a-half years standing still and SORN thereafter.

I have kept three fuses and the cigarette lighter as mementos.

A combination of bad dreams made worse by someone ringing up in the early hours and sending the dream off into previously undiscovered depths of paranoid weirdness. After that I had no chance of sleep so got up and did some reading. By half-past-four I had discovered this (and this)- which woke me up – and decided I had to write many an email to try and get the place’s funding reinstated in the long-term. While I hadn’t sought any replies, an acknowledgement might have been nice. I daren’t look in my sent items as who knows what nonsense I railed about at that hour?

According to my bank statement, they’re calling themselves ‘United Ultities’. Says it all.

Diagrams, Architecture, Security, Implementation, Group Work, Minutes, References, Demonstration,and overall:“A”