Spring clean

Last night I started copying my Korea and Japan photos to a replacement backup drive that arrived yesterday. (My main Korea and Japan photos drive stopped working properly about a couple of weeks ago, so I replaced it with one of the backup drives and sent the faulty drive off to Western Digital to get a replacement under warranty).

It was quite a hot night last night, and even hotter with my PC on. The PC was also quite noisy, so I didn't get a lot of sleep during the night. Since I wasn't asleep, I would check the progress of the backup every hour or two. At one point I found that the backup hadn't progressed any further than it had last time I had checked (and it wasn't that it was stuck on a giant file). The 'drive active' light on the drive bay wasn't lit either. So I cancelled the mirror in Beyond Compare (which I was using to do the backup).

But when I checked again later Beyond Compare still said that it was cancelling. So I shut the PC down about 5am (when it was already getting bright outside). This didn't work, so I Ctrl + Alt + Del'd the PC, then chose to shut down the PC from the Vista Ctrl + Alt + Del screen.

When I eventually got up (as opposed to woke up) about 8am, the PC was just stuck on the desktop with no taskbar or anything. The mouse was still responsive though. I Ctrl + Alt + Del'd a few more times, but nothing happened. So I hard to do a 'hard shutdown' (hold the PC's power button down for a few seconds).

After breakfast I started the PC up again and tried to continue the backup, but I got a message that a folder was corrupted and I needed to run chkdsk. I didn't really want to be bothered running chkdsk, especially since it was a new drive, so I tried just deleting the folder it said was corrupted.

But when I tried deleting the folder, I got a message that I couldn't delete it because the folder wasn't empty. Weird message, since you can normally delete folders with stuff in them. Why didn't it just say I couldn't delete it because it was corrupted?

Anyway, I tried deleting the directory from a command prompt using rmdir with the /s switch (which deletes the directory and its contents). But I just got the same message about the folder not being empty. So I resigned to running chdsk /r.

I checked my spleen mail, then I was going to go out on a walk to try and take more photos. But I decided I might as well try and clean up my bedroom a bit first as it had bits all over the floor from my MT-24EX diffuser construction efforts.

However, I found loads of other stuff on my floor as well, and my quick tidy turned into a spring clean that took up most of the day. I decided to get rid of all my old leaves and flowers that have been waiting over a year for me to photograph them. I figured that I'm not likely to have time to photograph them any time soon, so no point having them taking up valuable room space. If I do find some time in the future and want to photograph cut flowers, I can always just buy some more from a florist.

I was surprised at quite how dusty some stuff was.

Later in the afternoon I tried opening a new bank account with Nationwide. I had a fixed term ISA with them that had matured, but the account I told them to move the money, an e-ISA, requires a 'qualifying card account'. So I checked their website to see what a 'qualifying card account' is, and tried to open one (while the e-ISA pays less interest than the rate of inflation, it is still a lot better than their other ISA offerings, so I thought it would be worth opening a qualifying card account just to get access to the e-ISA account).

But Nationwide's online form for applying for a new account is pretty rubbish. They have a space to put your account number in. Below this box it has a handy link to info on account number formats. On that page it says that if you have a bond account number like 1234/123456789, then you should enter the full number like that. But the box on the form doesn't allow you to input that many characters.

Then it was also a similar case for the email address, which they limit to 24 characters, 1 character too short for my email address. Strangely, I edited the box using Firebug so I could fit in my full email address, and it didn't complain. On the final page it displays the details you've input so you can check them, and it displayed my full email address (not cut off at 24 characters), so I'm not sure why they limit the text input for it to 24 chars.

The other funny/annoying thing with their form is that on the final page it says that they might send you marketing materials, and if you don't want these, then you need to read the info on a link. But when you click the link it doesn't have anything about opting out of receiving rubbish.

The chkdsk finished, so I started up beyond compare again and finished off the backup. After that I wrote this blog post so far and checked my email (which took quite a while).

In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek TNG with Mauser and Bo, processed a pano, and watched Springwatch.

Food
Breakfast: Blackcurrant Jam Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Lunch: Grated Mature Cheddar Cheese with Cherry Tomatoes, Pickled Onions, and Iceberg Lettuce Sandwich; a bit of Barbecue flavour Filipino Corn snack; Satsuma; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Barbecued Shish Kebab with Chilli Sauce and Salad in a bun; Barbecue flavour Chicken drumstick; a bit of Barbecue flavour Filipino Corn snack. Pudding was 2x Apple Pies with Ice cream. Coffee; A few pieces of Galaxy Chocolate.