The latest Meme - Six Words

Who needs Haikus! Can you tell a story in just six words? Wired magazine picked up on this and published a big list. There are some crackers- mainly from writers- who else could write a story so succintly in just six words?

The best theemes derive from "what if" fantasy,

Here are my favourites from the Wired list.

Osama’s time machine: President Gore concerned.
- Charles Stross

He read his obituary with confusion.
- Steven Meretzky

Leia: "Baby's yours." Luke: "Bad news…"
- Steven Meretzky

And a few of my own...

Snipped the green wire. Still ticking!
- David Bolton

Time Machine Invented. Time Machine Invented...
- David Bolton

Life found on Mars. Bowie sues.
- David Bolton

Name that tune. Do a Deer.
- David Bolton

Are you "'Aving a Laugh"?

To quote Andy Millman (Ricky Gervaise's character in the second series of Extras). I posted an article on my main website - a DIY EMP generator. It's purely speculative on how one might do such a thing, and possibly a very silly thing to write about.

EMP is a phenomena associated with Fusion (and I think Fission) weapons that generates a very high voltage (potential difference) and current in a very short space (in a very short time). It was only declassified a few years ago- Wikipedia has more than you ever need to know on the subject. Anything electronic would have a very rough time of it - like being hit by lightning.

Makes a bit of a change from Water rockets!

PC Scare!

It's everyone's dread that their computer will crash and they'll lose everything important. For us developers it is even worse. Weeks or months of work could be lost. Of course everyone takes backups (yeah right!) but crashes happen at odd times, perhaps after a weeks solid work just as you were about to backup. Murphy's Law.

I turned my pc on the other day. Beep. "No bootable media" it said. It was the instant adrenalin rush, like the type of panic you get when your wallet isn't where it's supposed to be. The masive sinking feling in the pit of the stomach. Disbelief. "No it can't be happening to me" followed by some rude swear words.

I have a raid 0 setup. Two 256 GB drives making a 500 GB. The bios said that it wasn't working. Duh! Unplugged and off with the side of the case. Quick peek in with a torch. Ah, loose power connector. I've no idea why but one of the two SATA disk power connectors had come away from the drive. I pushed it back in. Power up. Beep "No bootable media". Bugger!

My first raid pc. Well nothing to lose- I clicked rebuild raid array. It worked, it recognised the array. Booted. Beep "No bootable media". Hmm. Back to the BIOS. I have a 3rd drive in there, an IDE and the BIOS had removed the raid from the first boot drive position. Restated it, rebooted and held my breath... Yeah Windows starting up.... Phewww. And nothing lost, corrupted or missing.

The next couple of hours were spent backing up the stuff I'd forgotten about. But I'm only backing up to to external drives which could themselvces fail. So I looked at various online backup systems and tried the free 2Gb storage of Mozy (the link includes a reference link, if you sign up via it I get a little bit free extra storage). Considering the time and effort that restoring takes this seems pretty good. It also runs in the background when the cpu isn't busy . I'll have to leave my PC on overnight for a couple of nights as it now has 14GB to send. But for about £30 a year I get 30 GB of backed up storage. That seems a pretty good deal to me.